Lisa Russ Spaar

What is mysterious about loss, flush of arm pulled from a wilted sleeve, summer’s urine-tang in autumn leaves? Let   John Keats light another fag. Or Brontë refuse the doctor on her black sateen settee. For whatever part of   you may be taken away, you said, is the scar I will visit first with my mouth, each time, as gold visits the thieved till, sun the obliterated sill, saying praise you for leaving me this you, this living still.

When this day returns to me I will value your heart, long hurt in long division, over mine. Mouth above mine too — say you love me, truth never more meant,say you are angry. Words, words we net with our mouths. Soul is an old thirst but not as first as the body’s perhaps, though on bad nights its melancholy eats us out, to a person. True, time is undigressing. Yet true is all we can be: rhyming you, rhyming me.

No one has touched me for weeks yet in this drugged, gilt afternoon, late, when nothing is safe, I’m paralyzed, as though so wildly desired—passing solo through the garden’s cinnamon, marigolds, famished roses, where a matted shingle of the swept-up human hair I begged from a local beauty shop & spread out fruitlessly among the blooms & canes to keep away the deer might well be a satyr passed out in the palace’s candied gold— that something regnant with a strange, godlike power could not help but reach out from the umbral blue to tap my white arm. It is a day to die, the light autoerotic, theatrical, with an unbearable listing, stalled in cusp, in leonine torpor. Is courage artifice? As though to answer were within my means. Or to even move my mouth.

Turning to watch you leave, I see we must always walk toward other loves, river of   heaven between two office buildings. Orphaned cloud, fish soup poppling, book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light. I think it is all right. Or do tonight, garden toad a speaking stone, young sound in an old heart. Annul the self? I float it, a day lily in my wine. Oblivion? I love our lives, keeping me from it.

Morning’s mirage, disdainful & calm as a mirror, held the shorn bush that yesterday flourished, now lopped canes & a scant spitfall of remnance, confetti trampled in the clefts of vanishing deer. To touch its truth I punched my fist into the chopped molest, the boscage—withdrew my red sleeve. Abstract that.