Unwoven

1

There were wrongs that could not be righted. Lie. There are wrongs.

I should have stayed & bathed her—one side at a time, until

I’d achieved the symmetry of attention, balanced—as a woman

feels when her lover lays her on the bed & stands, looking carefully

at all of her parts until she is freed, little by little, from the barracks of identity.

That I did not bathe, perfume, caress her corpse, then walk beside the wheeled table

she lay on as they pushed her into the fire, did not wait, watch, watch . . .

we both know this was wrong.

2

Long shadows are cast by people walking out to the end of the pier:

smudged, elongated forms swarming across the sand near my body,

where I, half in shade, half sun, sit fifteen feet below the concrete bridge.

They slice by like spades digging through thin air, echoes swimming

between worlds. The word “fucking” is so satisfying—

like using a shovel to move earth. If one is as true as one’s desires imply,

then why is life as it is? If I spoke I’d be skinless/naked.

3

The dead change, have changed, they allow death to be death . . . there they sit,

both of them, in their respective boxes & urns, on a table, in a room

otherwise quiet as the woods.

5

Too early, the cat came in with night in her coat. Later . . . I gave my sex

to a man who later had a bath. I shot photos of him in the bath where the light

through the bamboo cast from the window threw an otherworldly array of shapes

over his heart & belly, languid cock—his hands, floating in the hot water, cupped light

beneath his thighs. I no longer wanted him, but had him anyhow or gave him me out

of a sort of love, & now we speak of anything other than the way we both are our bodies

& are not—simultaneously, twice removed—once in first breath, once at last.