conditioned

woke in the middle of the night
no longer drunk
but wrung out
of seven different liquors
and the regrettable silence
I never keep
pregnant, sick, with the space
words leave when they leave
and I still haven't said a thing

it's like trying to get
to that deeper layer of muscle,
scraping the fat away
through disciplined
arches of the eyebrow
and concentrated
flares of the nostril

through throwing the last
of your baggage in a bindle
over your shoulder
after carving whatever
you were supposed to carve
on the post

through stretching to pick
the highest hanging fruit

and I wonder if I have plucked it too soon
even as it swells within me -
the juices sweet on my lips
but in my stomach, a sword.

somewhere in the coat you never owned
never even thought of until just now
is an address written down in case you needed it

and the paper is yellow
and ripped from a legal pad
from a life you almost lived

and the address is familiar
like fire on your lips

and you are touching
lightly this paper in your mind
and you are chewing on the edge of it
and staring into a street you don't know
a street you will never know

and it is winter and the coat is warm
and made of some kind of fur
and white as the snow blowing from the west
A wind you can't name places its hand on your neck


                             ****

In the morning, in your sleep, you slipped your
hand into the warm pocket of his sweatpants
as you bodies moved separately through dreams

When you woke, your head fit where the muscles
of his shoulder and arm meet
and when he sat up and said what he said
you were scared
and then suddenly
you understood
and then suddenly again
you were home

I am trying to learn you

your eyes and your smile
and the smile that is there
when you are not smiling

I haven't found that yet
and sometimes I mistake
your thinking face for an
anger I have seen before,

and it scares me, the quickness
of your clouds

but I think that is just as foolish
as making fun of German because
of its guttural sounds when it
contains the word sehnsucht.

How little I know of your pain
and its circumference.

How little I know of the coming joy.