Loiter

I’ll know the time to leave the room where I’ve been growing hair from my face, drinking dark beers when the light in the lake bums out. That’s when fish turn on their music. They lie in a blue current waiting for the moon to pass over, and the fishermen with their lanterns know this as they spill a can of sweet corn and wonder if they spoke what they were just thinking. I clear my way through the fog as music will break through static. The frogs strike up, a window goes out in the Home for Elders. Don’t you wonder why it is built far from anywhere, as though memory needs a terrain for forgetting; blind driveways to lost roads. As for my own parents, they did not grow old. What I know: dinners without conversation, stars that shine for anyone. I know my time is brief. I know love of the cut sleeve. I want to say don’t feel sorry for men, those who leave women smouldering like cigarettes, those who are fond of burials. War is a habit of mind, I swear by my mother’s gender. Tonight sticks in the leaves are slick as pilot snakes. Wherever I part branches no one is in a boat, no one has stirred a wake. Not jackknifing off the dock, it’s hauling myself back up that gooses my titties and makes my peter shrink. Don’t wake the cottonmouths. Summertime. If you were here and you remembered to stash your smokes in a Glad bag so they didn’t soak like mine we’d fall quiet now as pollen on water, I would tell you the true story of Urashima and the turtle.