Likestarlings

The Rope

Here, the virgin can step on six daisies at once,
so it is spring.
The slightest leaf of the Sunday papers in the backroom
sends the bird table pigeons taking wing
into broadening arboreal bloom.
You are somewhere that requires mosquito netting,
a sorghum broom
to sweep varnished floorboards of dead insects
in the cold sweat of morning.
A bayou beyond the blinds cackles ‘drink up!'
and you reach for the bottle
to wet the mouth of your tomb,
to quench until it overflows you,
turning your bed into a whiskey lagoon.

But the bottle is as empty as the Sunday here.
Dust motes dance in the space that is spare.
Two chairs with only one of us to fill them
may as well be a stadium of empty chairs.
The made bed beyond the ticking anteroom.
Your return can't come a moment too soon.

I am up and about, pottering in the quaint hours
kept by the English on Sundays,
the Mean Time that can be spent in manifold ways
but is spent the same way each time;
the one day when the outward spectacle
can match the inward desire to laze,
to live Churchill's energy-conserving ethos:
In life, never stand up when you can sit down,
and never sit down when you can lie down.

My doze by the spring-lit window
had become riven with anxiety:
I saw you lying on a far-off beach
in your bathing suit, being eaten by ants,
and alternated between the desire to forgive -
wanting to fetch you back right now -
and hoping I'd given you
enough rope to hang yourself with.