white bits of shell into densely packed mud.
Her obsession is a small animal gathering seed husks
in tunnels beneath the snow. The owl listens for the
dry scrape and scuttle. The bird blinks once as the
animal stills. The images collide here, in this moment.
The cart on the road is real. It exists in the resolute now,
drawing sand toward a work site near Dakar, where the
driver will sell it cheaply to make substandard cement.
The owl and the small animal are real as well, moving
through boreal forest in Siberia, they possess a reality
of sinew and ligature, of worn tooth and cracked beak.
Without these images, neither obsession could be seen.
The man lives to deepen grooves. The woman offers
motionless chill to mask her alertness. He is attracted
to this stillness at the coffee shop, sensing the appetite
through faint chemical signals that stir both arousal
and fear—if pressed, he could name neither impulse.
His persistence seems to her a steadiness that could
calm. Conversation over coffee leads to a coupling
neither can quite believe, a coupling in which they
open like strange flowers. In the emptiness afterward,
while the silence holds, he thinks of what they’ve done
and is aroused once again. It seems that he will do this
forever, in and out of years, until she is an old woman.
She looks at the ceiling and wonders, What’s the sound
skittering across the roof? A cloudburst? A raccoon?
If either speaks, this will come to an end. These things
are fragile. Yet just as he opens his mouth, an airliner
thunders overhead. It cancels all sound and saves them.
The night is not a hole
to fill with your thoughts.
It is not a sock to stuff
deep in the gob of morning
and hope the sun has
soiled itself there on the couch
where it collapsed after the gin.
The sun can be so tiresome.
The night is not a black dog
snuffling around the muskrats.
The night refuses to stumble
through Byzantine circuits
like loose electricity. The night
has no limbs. It never stutters
or grabs. It settles in like
a headache: there before
you know it then a pressing
darkness stained with light
and you wish you’d taken
that handful of crumbling
white pills before it came.
When they lead you into the room with the blind man
and let him drag his hands across the landscape of your face
so that you can smell his old skin and those yellow nails
that have begun to curl like claws, you will stand straight
and still and swallow your revulsion back into your throat
because once he has confirmed the bones of your face
fall into line with his memory of the bones of your father,
he will offer a tobacco-stained smile and a wine-tinged
exhalation and announce, yes, you could only be his child,
all the while fumbling for the greasy string around his neck
to withdraw from inside his shirt a key that still holds
the warmth of his chest when he drops it in your hand.
The map is in the box, he’ll say. The box beneath the bed.
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