A fence runs
between
the houses whose
rooms
are stacked with boxes
of things
that collected
over the decade,
ephemera of years that
started
when love was love
and duty
was a man in a
tank watching
Aral mountain
ranges on the
other side of a
Cold War border,
hands ready for
the pistol
and radio at his
reach
lest any hoards
tried
to dilute the United States of America
in storage,
I slept like a
bone in
an airless vault.
But everything
was turned inside
out
by the time I woke
up,
the fence remains
but everything
I live next to is
three stories high,
even TV antennas snatching
images
from the sky are gone from my view,
chimneys are rare
as honesty at retirement parties,
satellite dishes
sneak
the world to
my house of boxes.
And love became
duty
to remain on the
border
of the bed
my limbs stayed
in,
too late realizing
that
the line of death
was
my breath heavy
with scotch and mouthwash
and pithy perfumes for the tongue
when all my speech
became poetry
about duty and
honor while she nodded and brushed her
daughters' hair, she takes a loose strand
from her shoulder,
she examines the end, the hair is split,
voiceless, she
speaks
This where it
ends,
I cannot breath,
there are fences
running all over the world going somewhere
and all
we do is put the
past away
in boxes until the
corners of rooms
crowd me
and speaks to me
in loops of your language
that's liquid and
lost in attention to
details that are
about why
you become
invisible
even in bed,
which is more like
a mining camp
than the place
where
dreams slip across
the darkness
when we've stopped
talking, when our eyes are closed,
when our breathing
should be the same,
not a race to the
sunrise.
Everything is
inside out
and I'm stupid
enough
to believe that
the man in the tank
loves the world even
as bombs go off
around the limits
of our fences,
But now I love a
room
with high
ceilings,
empty corners,
rooms big to swing
a cat by the tail,
where my
voice rises high
and loud and rings
against
the pipes and then
dies
away like notes
plunked
from a fine-tuned
piano,
I love the
discovery shoes,
sober talk, doors
without locks,
windows left open
with every racket
of car alarm
and leaf blower
and weekend
carpenter
speaking to me in
sounds
that bustle
in phonics that
flash a language
that words trail
like a dog after
its master
where back yards
yield to one another
like lovers wearing blindfolds in abandoned parks
horrified that they might
be passing each other as
both their reaches miss their
objects of desire
and both of them walk sightless in the other direction,
around corners
and into busy traffic
before one, and then the other
takes off the blindfolds
to discover that they are
in a different city
than where they started the day,
every one is in another part of
the map, fenced in with invisible lines
that is the borders armies
make whole populations extinct for,
the world
might learn to do something
with fences that run up and down the
avenues and right into the living rooms
so that the couches and beds have
politics in every position you assume
running from stress, I say,
unwind my string
and kiss me, please,
you are a moon I want to have orbit me,
I am a gravity you cannot deny,
you make my fences sway in
your bluster and flower print dresses,
I regret fences I set up the day
you left town,
the last thing to be seen
were you on the other side of the fence
getting into your red Volvo
just before you drove away
with my heart in your trunk.
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