Suddenly, all those sad Decemberists songs
we sang on our beds, your car, the bus
to Heathrow, apply to us.
Well, except that one
about the chimney sweep whose love is dead
and the barrow boy whose love is gone
the Yankee soldier whose love is torn from him by war
the Odalisque whose lover is drowned
the double spy who trades a tryst in the  
greenery for documents, and microfilm too.

We are not the star-crossed William and Margaret
whose hazardous love provoked a cruel Queen,
their fates tangled in the roots of the Taiga.
We never made it to Grace Cathedral Hill
to watch the city lights in the cold New Year night.
I was more brine and **** and vinegar
than you knew.

I'll let you know if they ever write a song
for ill-timed confessions and bitten back words
and the way love can run out
like an empty tank of gas
halfway to the sea.

Disguised in a three-piece suit,
the Cowboy has made off with Helen of Troy.
Already leagues from the rubble of city walls,
the dust rises in billows as they
fly away breakneck on his Trusty Steed.
They hear the echoing uproar breaking
at their heels. Helen's hair is a streaming
banner of war, skin flushing a ruddy apple red.
She thinks of Golden Paris in his silence
reposed in long limbed quiet on their gilded bed,
waiting for her, for the fire to peel away
their faces, the scent of burnt fruit and decadent spoils
our sacrifice to the tittering gods, the insatiable Aphrodite.

But Helen rides.
The wind smells like foreign spices waiting for
her tongue. She breathes in the sweat on the back
of the Cowboys neck. Freedom is musk and cotton,
the rumbling murmur of water channels and ravines
rocking under their feet.

They sink into the western horizon and
I turn away from their embrace,
pausing to watch glorious Troy fall into
fast decay under their lengthening shadow.

The night, my face, your hands: The world is damp.
What else is there to do with all this weight,
but sink into the autumn grass, sedate,
sticking to the lawn like a fresh new stamp,
feeling the pulse of a steady bass amp
filling spaces between us like a freight
train, roaring to a new country, so late,
bearing fragile cargo to unknown camps.
I want to rage against the worst of me,
to keep deep down that brassy, dismal light,
wailing after you pulled me from the road;
your shirt's sweet warmth smelling like wet birch tree.
It hounds me to the core, the ifs and whys
of ugly nights, the drive to overflow.

Before I met him and learned to scream,
my hair hung thick, sheets of burnt oak wheat.
Rebel strands clung to my arms, trailing
my sides. Somewhere, I still hum Sam Cooke
(a change is gonna come, oh yes it will) and
Ma's back is turned in the kitchen, making pie.
apple slices in the blue bowl,
thousands of unknown thoughts
shifting under her small hands.
Pa folds into his armchair neatly,
hands tucked tight against his sides, quietly rubbing
holes in the soft wool, watching Streets of San Francisco.

The garbage can rattles, the street smells of pine.
I back out of the drive, on my way to the last first date
I will ever go on. I pop an orange tic-tac,
just in case. I don’t want him to taste
the sour ghost of an apple still sitting
on my tongue.

Shoeboxes in the upstairs prove
when veins were tight and hair was
that shining, gleaming, streamin,’
flaxen, waxen stuff of the 70s.
You would laugh if you could see
him in a toupee, shoulders broadened
against the end of a night shift, billy club
swinging steady by his side;
She, beautiful like Grace Kelly,
with high definition cheek bones,
her smile Rainbow Bright enough
to call the curtains down
and leave them that way forever.

But red velvet shrouds over them still;
His shoulders curve under tax forms and
knee replacements, cancer spots on his bladder and nose.
She plays with the extra turkey skin on her neck,
frowns at the grooves around her mouth.
The audience sees more than we want to.

They fade from unblemished black and white
into garish Technicolor,
Twenty-nine years
of dinner, ***** dishes left in the sink,
root canals, cat food cans,
******* stickers, laundry to fold, that milk
might be a week old.

They go on and I love them
for the death of romance,
for the things they've folded away in shoeboxes
for me to find.

My hand locks into yours
the same way I taste under my tongue,
parted and warm,
humming while your lips press

with quiet insistence against your heart.
I crawl inside its steady beat,
(just the summer,
sloping hills and white stucco)

lying between the hours,
your forearms tense with habit.
The white Jetta's
an uneven cavalcade of

windows rolled down, my thighs
melt bare, and
the sun burns slow and thorough
through dusk.
The tide pulls away
the thick New England sky.

Surrounded by beachgrass,
as the sun bares its teeth,
and wind tugs my hair,
we've laid the sea out, swelling
against the skyline.

We are a nest of angled limbs,
blue buntings perch on our legs
for words like what and why
and brine gathers above your lip;
Brace the slick dip between
shoulder and neck,
this swiftly tilting planet has
eyes like yellow fish weaving
circles around us.

Leave yourself up-rooted and
hide the homecoming in your kiss.
On the grass, and the sand, inside of me,
We fall apart slowly.