Nou toujou ap fè preparasyon pou libète.
          We are still making preparations for freedom.

1.

I'm not crazy. Don't think things skitter from the bed when I open my
door. But an awful lot of things do go skittering off the porch roof
just outside the window—raccoon, bird, giant insect, acorn, squirrel,
once a marsupial. Sometimes they don't skitter as quick as they should
and they peer in at me. Once a huge luna moth hung on the glass all night.
I want to reciprocate. I want to climb that big old pine and paste
my face to the raccoon's hole. Sit like a hoot owl on a neighboring
limb and watch the grackles roost sky blue brown-speckled eggs. Stalk the pale lime
fey Saturniid from one end of the Nearctic to the other
and see who dabs the cat's-eyes on her shoulders. Come to an old Inuk
who remembers laughter many years before when a bush pilot said
A man has walked the moon and puzzled glances when a teacher marveled
at how kangaroos and penguins warm their young. Here, he says and passes
a foul-gull quill inherited over a hundred generations
slipping a slightly yellowed gingko leaf from the lip of his kamik
and pressing that too in my hand with a twinkle in his eye. She's yours.


2.

If I had four wrists, I'd shackle one to each of you and free my neck
and ankles for the kind of jig Aunt Trisha did at Grandma's funeral.

The opportunities for twirling with Kali multiply, the more
arms dancers have extended from their torsos; the more sleight-of-hand taps
the plane of second chances, replaying selected moments like those
flashdance movies where the camera cuts a couple seconds here or there
and everybody looks like Fred Astaire on the sprung maple floor, thick
with outtakes of Ginger-Rogers feet tripping on light fantastic air;

and the more we've banked against that long series of negotiations
we describe as coming down to earth. For what's earthier than pushing infants
through the dark tunnel of love and out into the scrutiny of day,
to drop us to the straight-cut wood, making my traipse through Sichuan and your
on/off plan to leave me for your dear friend Anthony two lightly
sprained fingers included in today's fantasia of stiff and bitten
upper lips? Lights. Camera. Action. It's not the RKO Orchestra,
but let's go through the old motions after someone makes eggs for the kids.


3.

I see every cranny of the cave where we hid the dripping pigtails
of those poor children dawn caught at the riverside and rebaptized as doves
herded by thin transparent bats into the cold night lair of the sun.
The ansyen fanm warn of glimmering sky-lips through which each new moon slides
with gifts of bread and sizal honey for the fiends holed up in our heads.
Manman caresses my cheek with the soft leather of her fingertips
and sings me songs so old she says no human people ever knew them
until creatures of the swamp—one of the songs says so—lent them to us.
One of the saddest goes on so long I'm always asleep before it
finishes but manman says I'll know its final verses when I'm grown,
a song of the jicotea sentenced to confinement in his shell
until he makes blood payments to the brothers of the crickets he ate.
Madam Heron hates his prison too and whispers into the Bastille
vent the way of restitution and then of taking to the air
but when manman bends close to whisper it in my ear I'm already
gone and only my hard round shell sits there in her lap inattentive.


4.

You smiled when I sweetly opened my lips to sugarcane, cocoa-palm,
coffee, cotton, indigo and the flags the Spaniards and Frenchmen raised.
I too am a commodity fertilized with bone-meal and blood-meal
like seeds pried from the deadhead of Gambia, riverborn enslaved
to Draga, blessed and fed Eternal Life, then off to hell in Saint-Domingue.
Creoles know nothing about Africa but the lashing together
of wrists and how limbs sing to you while you dine on our beef in the breeze.
Smell.  I'm wearing the French perfume you tried to buy me with but I am
old enough now to realize what passed from heron to turtle to manman
even if I closed my ears the moment my own blood ran on the bed
she left me. I'm sorry for the crickets black as I am but on days
when their sisters disappeared the jicotea swallowed only what
the wind and dust fed its beak. Do we carry the masters inside us?
Do moths fluttering inside the turtle's heart and the white of manman's
palms itch to betray us to the giyotin disguised as kanpanil?
I said Show me the paper! If she owns you, then show me the paper!


5.

Hello? haggard spider? dust-festooned corner web here on a porch screened
to totally exclude your meals? If you're still alive maybe you need
to get outside or are you still angling for that UNFILLED MUSE job?
In that case do hoover off your silks and pinch your cheeks or paint on rouge
to put some color in your face! I don't mean to be bossy but it's
unappetizing looking so spinsterish and your threads so mossy.
No, never mind: that job's passé now, I'm moving on, and you should too.
Can I help? You don't look like you can weave a new home if I tapped you
in a cup and put you outdoors, and if I go find a bug okay with
being food, I fear trying to fix it in your web would do more harm
than good. Can I tousle your ears like an old dog's dying on the rug?
Buy you medical marijuana, get you more channels of cable?
We've both gone bloodless as long as we're able, now this voice eggs me
to strain right through the screen, like Jesus's camel through the needle's eye,
talk my way into a ride when the rumbling recycles truck comes by?
You're welcome to come too, but if not, promise me you'll try something new?


6.

It is nice to be rich, at least I have taken that much from New York.
You cannot pry any love away from that cold place, but dola? Wi!
Not that it will do me any good if the weather keeps up like this.

The gold grass outside wears a foam of dead moths stirred by the building heat.
What she thinks is cicada song are tiny, brittle mite shells rustling—
and then she closes the door and there's only the air conditioner's
loud whirring. It is their 55th drought day spanning June and July,
Pòtoprens is a city of vultures and Gonayiv vulture's bones.
How much can die in two months? She goes to the pantry for jarred peaches
and canned Starbucks, air bubbling between her ribs. Odd, she reflects, if this heart
is the thing that kills me after all this.  She sputters as the bubbles
fill her neck and then jam up the back of her head. Bright-colored leaves float
from the edges of her eyes and she sees: nothing is dying but life's
gathering itself into a spiritual dimension where it has
always been cool. She runs to the window to raise the shade and look out
one last time with her new eyes. Her last thought is Someone made a mistake.


7.

You're a sorry one, who can't feel his inner organs—liver, kidneys,
heart and spleen inert, inches under the skin. Orphaned macaroni
penguin eggs whose moms said Go  are at the door. Sailor, you've got pilgrims
in the bilges and nobody's leaving port without those babies on board.
The world-your-oyster's not just shell and brine. The gob inside's a deeply
held conviction. Your brain yammers so loud, you can't hear squat! It's got you
thinking squid ink—only lets the monsters of the deep speak up when they're
infected, charley-horsed, contracted, wracked with nitrogen. Where are your
yearning masses huddled? Where do you dream of going if you're a sack
of silent stones, the surface of a black hole? Don't go all overboard, Tom.
I'm sure it's all there in the background. You just filter it out. Your brain—
Anne, I know! It's listening on earphones and keeping me in the dark
for fear I'll figure out the game it's running. And I am going to.
Will 40 hours of deathlike quiet on a cold slab break the logjam?
I want to hear that brain hum! Feel its heat. Come up, Moses, take your rod,
strike the rock! Let's start with the heart. Don't tell me I can't feel my own heart.


8.

She's died, responsibilities dissolved, nobody needs to know
where she'll be tonight. Her kernel rolls off the edge of few dimensions,
a slow lamp draws close and stops to let a Sikh man off, and the cute dog
driving tilts its happy, panting face. She has no bus pass or exact
change. No time goes by, or the dog waits, or she and it both migrate in sync
while she rummages in her bag. Where is that poor daughter who is so
desperately sad? The man with wife and two kids of his own? She can climb
into the dark mouth of the purse or board the bus. An inviting breeze
also stirs above her and a half moon loafs. Ogé's on the bus wheel
and Ossé grins from beneath the great black bumper. Skulls and bones of whites
ring the bell to stop at Place d'Armes. She tilts into the driver's panting
and remembers from her village: it's Saj Claire's soft gray puppy. Manman
will be there at her first stop! Will they then get manman's manman? The whites
grow warm and silent. She laughs aloud. The dog seems to nod. It's very
funny, very light, very nice that someone else is driving. She sits
back and draws her purse snugly up against her waist. Li bon. She's relaxed.


9.

Steel-tentacled maelstroms whip light and dark rivers into an oyster
magnetosphere rippling with eely silver streamers about to firm
into lightning. With pneumatic trumpetings, her bus door shuts, then brakes
release the wheels. The souls of black folks fixed to them moan in circles that
acrobatic wideawake terns sketch by connecting runaway stars.
Famn timid  peek through gwo medsiyen and hope. The soft lap of the waves
unspools crimson ribbons that weave through the young dancers' proper chignons.
The cavern gulps constellations. Disturbed bats pursue their passion for
mosquitoes to christenings and bon-voyages.
                                                              How's that shit?  he asks.
Oh! This motherfucking shit is the Clydesdale! This motherfucking shit
is the Mother of Motherfucking Shit! Fry stick? I ask. Wow. Right on.
The best, he says. Fucking embalming fluid fucks you up monster, right?
It's exactly fucking what happens when you die and your brain starts to
turn into liquid sushi. Except right now only part of your brain
is liquifying!
                 I follow behind her. Who needs a fucking bus?
You are a fucking genius, Éric! This shit is fucking good! Sent bèf!


10.

Sun's up somewhere, lighting everything except the darkness it spins in.
It's no surprise when rays strike dirt their first thought is We've died and gone to — !
Earth's indigestible physics tingle after an eternity
of uniform omnipotence, fortuities arise in reaching
for Newton's shy apple or offering thin skin to Ockham's razor.
Complaints about the limitations of this System speck the porch screen
like lost dandelion fluff. Risk! Dare be more than morganatic! Pack all
your chests of gold onto a lint armada and sail torpedoes damned
against Britain and its wolves grown fat on undefended princesses.
No lust, no creativity? One slip of a fart has umpteen gods
aswirl in it, each busting for a fight. Cast a beam out of thine eye!
No one made and gave this world to you but you do have art and craft to
fashion something grand if you drag yourself out of the tar pit, pluck out
the pinfeathers and stars from your eyes and take one gutsy walk outside.
The rolling you hear isn't thunder or dustbins being wheeled to curbs
but cannon-shot from aeons back that never plan to come to rest.


11.

Preparasyon pou libète. The only thing I know about that day is: It will
come. And so the only question is: Am I prepared for it? Let it go,
I've heard the dying tell those round the bed and vice versa. But I
won't let go of the gold skin that clothes your palms or the island
shirts you gave me and then pronounced me honorary kreyòl! I know
we parted angrily and I needed better ways to organize
my feelings for you and for my wife and kids, but as you loved to say,
Sa-a se lavi, ki fè lagè, ki se renmen. Life, war and romance
call their own shots, barge in the door like slavers also bringing caged birds
from Sénégal to sing in gardens of the rich and smuggle needles
through the house servants' hearts—but love leaked from our pores and made us tremble
as we lay down machetes and coaxed scared doormice from the pockets of
the slain. Libète. Will egalite ak fwatènite then come
on time like tame neighbors with noodle salad and Italian cookies,
or must preparations be complete, each fork in place, beverages chilled
and enough comfortable chairs and amiable smiles for everyone?


12.

In flitting moth light I saw you naked at midnight out in the garden
of the house next door and weighed the pros and cons of coming out myself
with a sheet to wrap you in and lead you back to bed but by the time
I realized I was gawking for the sake of gawking a light came on
in the room of the stoner teenage girl who always keeps her shades up
no matter what and there she was looking first at you and then at me.
Her shoulder area and chest were naked too, and when I realized
so were mine, I smiled. Of what use was the sheet now? I did the only
honest thing and went downstairs and joined you in their garden and you turned
and smiled as though to say What were you waiting for? As if agreeing
the light in the stoner's window switched back off and I felt confident
enough she'd gone contented back to bed that I began to kiss you
then and there even though you stayed asleep and your nipples were slippery
with cold dew. An erection woke us both up!—me from this negligence
and you from what you told me later was your dream of picking lilies,
which you knew was theft but passionately felt you needed for your stir-fry.


13.

Blood longs
                 to be courted; pools in turtle ankles; sprints in gull veins pinned
like kites to flicking minnows or stinking sandshark carcasses; a girl
slices her arm to chase a high; her brain stem expands in sharpened fields
till she floats above a cairn of gory clothes, blue hair and bluing skin;
a boy cuts his stepfather's throat and speaks of gold brushing his taste buds;
poison ivy scales a tall dry oak to claw the sky; root-tethered
it spits urushiol at chalk-faced mockingbirds.
                                                                Blood vamps
                                                                                   as shameless
vines ooze down, paw the iron hinges on the oak doors of St. Chad's Shrine.
Somebody from the RSPCA called to ask why the terrorized
rabbits in Storrs Park keep reporting your name and address; they're either
burrow-starved or were chased down by shrews, and once you've seen a young doe meet
that fate, you'll starve; offer the new moon hens or lure chariots toward
its hungry tide; best yet, pull on something wet and red yourself and fly
back to New Jersey.
                             Blood pleads
                                                for reception wherever it courses;
here I stand with an armful of roses and a train of squires heated
and hardened by days on the backs of thunderclap-startled horses.


14.

My parents are moving, and though they're moving much closer to my house,
it feels like they're moving farther off. They won't be “there,” and the new place
isn't on my mental map, but on that plane where fearless mariners
and optimistic suicides sail.
                                       They called me today. Their buyers
are moving fast, closing in three days. A big truck like a caravel
will come, take cargo on, and go, probably to someplace the movers
don't know either, but will follow their GPS to.
                                                                  I didn't know
my parents had this kind of spunk.
                                                  Once I have visited their new home
a few times, the strangeness will end. When ships steer for dark shores, odd spaces
open up that will gradually become familiar, like a tossed coin
taking an awful lot of time in the air....but certainly will land
and close that space back up.
                                           All this by way of preface: it is my wife
who's weighing on me, running deeper, flying wider in our marriage
as middle age quiets the chop, something that ought to be a good thing
but doesn't feel good yet. I'm used to the flat-earth paradigm we've done
so well with all these years. I'm scared of chimeras, slippery horizons.


15.

I'm not free,
free to let you sit around all day and grow up to be

dunces and misfits,
free to let you treat sweets and soda as food groups,

free to say I don't like to play basketball with you,
free to walk out

of the house and leave you wailing
in the care of an unengaging

babysitter, free to be a bitch.
                                         Our neighbor's a free parent who

seems in seventh
heaven spending all day with her little boy and girl,

supervising them a constant source of joy to her,
she is a weird

Venusian, someone has removed her mind
and installed a custom made

parent program
tailored to two kids no one else on the block can stand

for ten minutes,
she is free like rocks are free, like robots are free too

in that they get to do everything they have urges to do.
                                                                              My kids

joke, Yes do it, get the fix and be like Annie,
the big green spaceship

where she got her surgery done will be
back in our sector next week,

why stay a prisoner of biology
when you can replace yourself

with totally
cutting edge extraterrestrial stupidity?

and I say, Thanks guys, you've opened my eyes,
now get the fuck out of here.


16.

Liebe macht frei?  Love liberates you? Its concentration camp sports lines
outside its gates a mile long, jazzy spaceships tinkle Good Humor bells
and everyone flocks to the fence for Popsicles and Oreo bars
disguised as self-help class disguised as Movies On Demand disguised as all
the other shapes the sly Venusians assume as they pimp us options
in cars equipped for raptures we never reach because we don't lay roads.

At the door, electric eyes ID you and make sure your wrist is slit.
New Age mantras guarantee you'll never feel a thing. All our heros
rebel against what if not us? We embrace them nonetheless and damned
if they don't hug us back. Love kills everything it lays hands on but souls
who go cold turkey to practice hate are rounded up by U.N. troops
and doomed to spend their natural lives in The Hague.
                                                                              I'm as pacific as
the next guy but what if everyone's bought a bill of goods and death row
is Philospher's Row? Satan's sin is delight? The 90%
of our brain we keep walled off is a tie breaking "flight-or-fight-love" lobe?
Odysseus was right all along and home is where the pith starts to dry?


17.

Sure, you have a mile-high tower of problems.
We could both spend our time
laboring up stone steps toward the gay pennants,
or we could leave a squad
of elves to keep an eye on things
and mount up, to ride over the rise.
Worst comes to worst,
we reach a desert and invoke the Şlāh al-Āstsqā,

       Other rains once fell and other rains shall fall
       But the rain that falls is
       The rain that falls
       And that is the rain the plants will drink and reservoirs
       Collect until a new rain falls
       Which might be the rain that kills or might
       Be the rain that ends our drought of zeal
       Though we don't pray for either cruel
       Or gentle rain but we pray
       For any rain at all to wet the soil.

Please lead me? I'm a slave of prudence
and it's you who knows adventure
to be air. If fathers were entrusted
to their sons, how marvelous
our lives would be! Has anyone tried it,
one dad embarked with his boy
for points unknown, with no provisions
but their feet and smiles on their lips?

The idea puts a smile on my lips right now
and you would jump for joy.
We could say a few goodbyes and leave
with brand new minds in five minutes.


18.

Fear, al-Khwf, pè,
a massive cave so empty
it even lacks darkness

and murders thoughts
before they wean,
indifferent
assassin of freedom

Jesus sang Be not afraid,
the Spirit encouraged
pale apostles

but these upstart
figures of the Blessed Trinity
did not kill Fear

His commandments
corpses on the road
up which we limp
to fatten Him
 
on the precious
children He lusts for.
Kouraj, imajinasyon—
where

do their children sleep?
what food do they eat?
An old seer says fearless

people vanish
and walk amidst us
to whisper in our ears
only

at those times when strangers
appear in chilly rain
and roughly ask for

a man's intestine
or that place in a woman
where she prays
for more

love.
Fear laughs drunkenly
and chews and farts more noisily
than he-goats

or slips about in shadows
late at night,
but mothers get used
to Him

eventually
and He will let you hold
your daughter if you promise

never to leave.
When He sleeps,
even dogs are welcome to examine

His penis,
but no one dares
pull a hair from His chin
except tata

who He punched and struck blind
twice,
once on Easter,
once on the day she died.


19.


Bad women who abort babies deprive Master of his property,
manman said one day with a grim smile that made me wonder what she meant.
Then the doktè mulata said abortion sometimes freed women from lèsklavaj
pa byoloji, enslavement by biology.
                                                   Neither Master
nor biology helps me raise a child, so I did it. If manman
was here, she'd smoothe my hair and sing something soothing to make my tears
feel welcome.
                   It's not your fault. I left left soon after learning I was
pregnant because I want to be nearer manman.  The day I let you
make me pregnant was weeks after I knew our relationship was doomed,
lèsklavaj  pa byoloji, emosyon, sikoloji. The day
of the D&C was cold but the nurse who prepped me was warm and said
I looked just like her tata  Anne. The D&C itself was awful.

Manman no longer sings to me, but her lap does hold my poor baby
and her hands do stroke its head as they did mine before trouble was born.
It is not the baby who is lost from the lineage of being
with its anguishes and comforts. I am. I have stepped outside the door.


20.

Le Code Noir updated Exodus and Deuteronomy spelling
out the legal rights and status of all French Empire slaves—Sundays off,
prohibition of torture worse than whipping or slicing a hamstring
and for adult workers age 10 and above, two pots of cassava
and two pounds of corned beef weekly.
                                                        Creeping socialism! the planters cried.
Big Government telling citizens what to do with their property!
Next, cattle and chickens would have rights, protections!  But Louis XIV
stood firm. He was a Christian king and head of a modern slave empire.
Flourishing, well-run enterprises did not have overseers gouging
out eyeballs with their bare hands or starved plantation workers dropping dead
right and left in the sugarcane fields, in the Age of Enlightenment.

La barbarie sur un étalon blanc est encore la barbarie,
barbarism mounted on a white stallion is still barbarism.
Ironic, but also ironic you sitting now straining to hear
my voice, since you barely listened to my shouts when I stood at the foot
of our bed and insisted on more than Le Code Noir de L'Adultère.


21.

While you make preparations for your liberty, and I for mine, Tom,
are there preparations we can make to not amputate our children's
natural wings? They rely on our judgment in all matters but the most
immediate—and then how freely they dissent and make suggestions
for improvement! Is it too late for us to do the same? Look at what's
in front of us at this moment: A gorgeous fresh ham in the oven
trimmed with sauerkraut and a lobster-pot with eight ears of sweet corn
in it. That magnificent iced tea you make has cooled. My unrivaled
cole slaw is reaching its peak of perfection in the bowl two dear friends
gave us on our 15th anniversary just last month. We both adore
the kids. Our teeth don't hurt and your lower back's behaving. So why let
what happened days or months or years ago reach up from the muck and snatch
our lollipops? Is it too late to smile with warmth accorded neighbors
and walk downstairs to have one of the most pleasant hours of our lives?
Don't we always tell the kids Count your blessings  and Make the best of it?
Can't we show them that even broken couples can show class, affection?


22.

“When do you feel most free?” I ask the chokecherry tree by the garage.

This year, early March. Sap was rising. My leaf was going to be first.
Everything was there for me. And it turned out a pretty good season.

“Really?” I say. “Look at you. It's mid-July and you have dying leaves.”

You go right ahead and be the oak. I like to have my pick of seats.
So if I have to wait until the cold play starts—then I wait gladly.

“What about when you blossom, and fruit sets, and birds eat it—feel free then?”

I wouldn't use the word 'free' then. But 'sensuous,' yes! That minor pang
of masochism? Like what you get when you rub a mouth-sore with your tongue?
Or somebody sucks your nipples just a smidgeon of a tug too hard?
No. Freedom for me comes before the heavy breathing. Before the love.

“So how do you prepare ahead to have sap running early in March?”

A small trick. Must be instinctual. I didn't think it up—it just
occurs to me. Make bitter little cherries and then stop. Start storing
next spring's sugar up. Fruit's not a pissing contest. Each drupe's begging me—
'Please. Just a tiny bit more.' But I wrestle with myself. I hold back.


23.

Yes, life's a cocoon, etc. That's often mentioned. Less so that
most of the luna's life is past by the time the mouthless winged thing
crawls forth to flutter and mate. Who thinks of five homely, hidden instars
munching sweetgum leaf? The cocoon's a Mexican jumping bean if you
unwrap its cloaks, hold it in your palm. Then what to do? You can't rehang
it to the twig. Sickly curious, you pry into the pure white wool
of its affections and find a dark conch-shaped homunculus
flailing and flipping like a cod in a gunnysack, but dreaming of flight
on great green wings—then fails, from exposure. Is it better to mature
and then die stuck like a cryptic post-it on a windowpane, wings frayed
by fugitive flights? Do dead pupas and moths awake to different or
the same next-afterlives?
                                    Failed lovers, reborn, eat satisfied lovers
for breakfast. Everyone gets a shot and takes a shot as life's wheel turns
the protoplasm into this pot or that. The glaze of joy, the glaze
of confusion and pain, bake onto each face and chip off bit by bit,
rewarding agony, taking their pound of flesh for your sweet caress.



24.

Yes, life's a room through which a sparrow flies, etc. That's often
said too. Martine spoke of the her little brother's careful preparasyon
for dawn Mass, and the curé's  old black hand shaking as it tipped red wine
into the crystal cruet that tipped into the gold chalice later
during the Consecration—transubstantiation—that tipped the blood
of Jesus down his throat so parched. Preparasyon  at Confession when
the curé's  voice shook as he asked Èske gen charnèl peche, are there sins
of flesh?  The old way: a priest's frailty complements awe and ritual
to make faith deep. She said our affair was like that and I laughed it off
but of course she was right. She always was. She said Ou bezwen pi fò kwè,
you need more faith. Is Jesus going to hurt you? No. He will prepare
you for what will happen. I asked what was going to happen, and she
just said M'ap lapriyè mwen fè erè, I pray I'm wrong,  and left it at that.

How can I give you a picture of her? A sparrow flying across
a room, a beam of sunlight on which wet clothing hangs to dry, a saint
of the flesh her Jesus only tasted in his passion and death throes.


25.

I chose my own bondage
and sank deep
in Lemon Hart 151
                           rum,
totally camouflaged as a wobbegong—
not that anyone
          wanted more from me than its
          white flake
          for their fish and chips,
which I gave
                   freely. Everyone said,
Leather can be made from his skin,
but no one
                knew how.
They left it behind for me to refill
luring octopus,
                     snapper, blackfish and moray eels
with fleshy whiskers
that looked like food.
It was an existence if
not a life in bloom, and given
what lay
            in wait above the waves,
I should almost have stayed
flat on the sea floor.
Who said
liberty is wise?
It is what it is and when you desire
                                                  it badly,
you rise, torpedoes and the bends be damned!
What brightness! What
                                 exhilaration!
What invincibility seemed mine,
the old skin
                triumphantly shed,
and the new—well, the old
                                      mantle had weighed me down
and this new golden, airy being
didn't need one!
Who did I think
                       I had become
if not Icarus?
I wasn't well enough prepared
                                           for freedom.
I bit off more than I could chew and learned the hard way:
love's
        not what bubbles
in your blood but what you feed to passion
that's not shared.


26.

As they paid you more—the more “valuable” your time—
less and less made sense
                                    to do.
                                    A $100 an hour
                                    woman in the grocery aisles?
Trimming a pot roast?
Pushing a pram?
Shooting the breeze with a girlfriend
                                                    who still wore running shoes
                                                    to work?
                                                    Increasingly, only the high-priced
                 corporate paralegal work
                      seemed an important
                               enough activity
                                                     for you.
                                                     One night you noticed
                                                     your face wet with tears
                                                     and wondered what text
                           you were reading,
                                 unbeknownst,
  as you pored over a dry prospectus.
                                        Something—that same hex?—
                                        proposed you dial our number,
                                        and you listened,
                                                                and did,
                                                                and I picked up.
                                                                Tom? you said
                                                                as if it
                                                                had been me
              who had reached out to your heart
              and suggested that you call.
              It was not,
                              and all I said was Hi.
                              You didn't know what to do
                              then
                              when the face
of the real herald rose
in your mind. Flustered,
you wanted to hang up,
                                  and almost did.
                                  Instead, we had the oddest conversation
                                  about
                                           what time you were coming home.
                                           We were in synch after all:
                                           we both knew
what happened:
you'd dialed a wrong number
to your own husband.
Afterwards,
                 the prospectus was so rich with innuendo,
                 you knocked off early.