Since I Memorized Your Face

Foreign life unfolded into the spring air,
decaying breath, smiling between branches
of the neighbor's poplar. She poured
herself into my eyes, and I drew a bonsai
inside her mother's plaid jacket, the orange
glow escaping from within the third movement,
a modern vesuvius: cold and breathy, aspirated
and alone amidst feeding sparrows, seedlings
uprooted and dire. I stood, the door in my arm,
and waited blind for the mail. And she came with
a bag in hand, an unfolded blanket, a child
hanging from her lips. Crying as the mail came in,
the letters awkwardly addressed to the chinese
girl in my basement, singing
drawing on the walls, making the beautiful my life,
I hugged her while she raised her hand to hide her eyes.

Still and naked I stood, and she typed impressions
upon my skin, pounding and pounding on metal keys,
the piano untuned since 1973, and a rusted bracelet slipped
from her wrist. My naked body stood like a figurine
soldier, and she lifted me, and she dropped me
into the sink, paint washing down her face like the time
we spent all day in bed, playing dead, hammering nails
into each other's hands, driving stakes into each other's
hearts. She would smile often then, her lips open windows
into the turning autumn, red and red and red and red and red and red
until the wilting flowers drooped entirely and she would stand
before me, exposed and barren, forty miles from
the nearest town, dirt in her hair and mine. I would paint
into the night and a mirror, explaining the undesired results
of our first child with soft strokes of a horsehair brush. Dust to dust,
she would say, and I would paint.
I would paint with hands chapped, bleeding, folding the night
into a little package, tied lightly into a bow: she stabbed me for an hour
before I rose into the night. I rose.

And the pale faces on her cheeks laughed in the cold air, her laughter
less and less as she tried to become something that I wasn't and never could be.
She tried for days before the letters came, and the addresses
scribbled with her blood came, sent from the devils. We would open
them like we opened each other, in panoramic beauty, and read
with silent eyes news from her brother, distracted by a war. Alone
she wanted. Alone she stood. Alone I breathed and became her air,
filling her. She would cry sometimes when her skin grew cold,
and we would bow down, raising our hands to the top of the sky,
stretching forth the insignificant figures written on our hands: I do
not want to feel pain. I do not want to feel pain. Together we would pound
nails into one another's hands to stop the bleeding. She screaming.

Until morning she slept. Until morning our child slept, and I rose
in the dark to become her, and we became one flesh, being no more.