feathers, iron

IMPROVISATION WITH DESCENT

Maybe because I’ve never had blood oranges

for breakfast or for any meal

or at all or even looked at them

without shuddering visibly

while housewives coursed past

in the velocity of their convictions

and I thought of all the other things

I was not willing to take in

the pills the medicine the one last drinks

at midnight the strange lips

and cloud of new perfume

and the perforated lobes of her shell-like ears

maybe it was a sickness

that brought me here

vibrating in the clotted aisle

trying to remember the shape of a bruise

or the estimated weight of the moon

or the pathology of hunger

whatever it was I knew

it needed my name in order to be mine

and maybe this would be

my first marriage

the thing I’d pray to in the darkness of the day

in the solicitous absence

of the sun while the clouds

slowly arrayed overhead

like an abacus of air

maybe I could measure

how far one must fall

to stop falling to find the end.