This Impotence

This Impotence

"Green leaves on a dead tree is
our epitaph--green leaves, dear reader,
on a dead tree."

Cyril Connolly (1903–74)

Sober thresholds seem like threats.
Their doors (your eyes) with closing lids.
Just once I want to stand
on tables of old grief.
Watch masks slide off like running mice.

Take ashes from my mother's urn--
stir them in a coffee cup.
You'll claim I've poisoned leaving rites.
That's all we know for camels' humps,
this hoarding of the brutal sadness
slicing suns behind your back.

Pain oxidized and left a mark.
Liquor always scrubbed our hands.
We knew no other way to bathe.
I've learned from tea bags
of your eyes
that dry is light, more portable
than lunch pails of wet honesty
with ugly worms in apple cores.

You'll tell me you are over her--
you have no dreams of
brushing toes beneath
white whipping cream of sheets,
no memory of apron strings
and negligees like nooses
hugging twitching necks.

You'll say she didn't rule your heart,
sanctify your happiness.
And I will flip the batter's dime,
swallow edges of the burn,
pick at conches of your ears
until I hear the parting lips
of Arnold's melancholy sea.


Janet I. Buck

Posted over on Poetry Magazine