Slut Dreams
(for John Donne)
Punk cellist. Braced for banishment.
Your hectic face, your miscreant strut,
The fluctuate air hums your ruined frequency.
Your superheated breath in my superannuated back,
I turn slow and understand malnourishment
At last. I watch you break, and see you crack.
Whose skin did you inhabit today? This century?
You sucked so much from me and now you
Don't even have enough left to borrow.
Still, I'm going to take it all, the full sum of your worth.
Can you love someone yet wish them only
Sorrow?
Nights in Cassadaga, cool mornings in Seoul.
Give me your arms, donate your shaky armoury.
Before you I never even knew I wasn't whole,
Corrugated wharflike and rusted as a cannery.
My wary bordertown heart is like the lightning tree.
Black and crooked. Split and elementary.
Dubious as blind things writhing in a hole.
The sleek wolves smell you, the blind bears find
Your scent amid cordilleran folds
And the tail fan of a talus
And immediately follow.
Eagles and buzzards wheel in the impossible sky.
I'm a man. I'm alive. Under the bright cold
Silver blue dome. Adamant
Draws us earthward, but
What next? To whom
Do we run? Is this where
Love goes to die or where
It might in fact begin again?
The cyclic world is giving birth
To its own addermouth end.
We will find each other in the blue-sky valley
After the carious rocks have crumbled, after
The parched trees have cracked open, everything
Once living laid bare to the world's scrutiny. And you
Will bear me from the charnel field, my brother,
My blessèd sister, deliver me to my home. You
Are of my iron heart always. You my
Mutinous pestilent love are
Carved from my own ambivalent flesh. Did you
Dream of me or I you?
It matters not. Dream, dream, my love,
And never stop until sleep is done.