Baby, you sure look sick.
When I first held you that’s what I thought,
this one won’t last.
Everyone wanted a piece of you.
But I held you close, and the sky leaned in
all filled with rain, and those first-time
singers cleared their throats,
their hair all in the tops of trees and the motel signs.
See, I said, I’ve seen a sign!
and we pulled up on the escarpment
and ate fried food, and you took your breaths
in droplets, and drank so deep the streetlights spun
with milk.
By morning you were thirty.
So gassed and shaken. A wind had caught itself
in you and couldn’t get out.
Hey, I said, don’t snag on his insides,
they’re all he’s got. But your heart shook like a guitar
that gets played and played
and only knows those songs,
the sorrow songs,
and you said ‘sing to me’
and baby, I like to sing, so off we went,
and sang ‘Love in the Museum’.
That’s a good one, though it makes me cry.
See, I said, there’s love in the museum!
I straightened out your fingers one by one.
You died, and your face stayed on the sheets.
I was restless then. I hate those nights.
You’re heavy, baby.
The weight of a man in your bones.
Why you want the face of a man
with the face of a child?
Why have one and still the other?
You’re small for a man. That’s what they say.
They look at me funny.
Every eye naked as a highway
of bathers stretched by the pools on the motel roofs,
every one the same, one after the other,
while we looked for a place to lay our heads.
You sleepy now. I have a thing in me.
A bird or something.
It’s cold, and knows the words of songs.
We sing now. Baby? You there?
I’m tired. I’ve seen your breath, flagged man.
You going now. Should we go. Baby?
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