Burning Again

In this basil
I am Judas—
don't mean to wake you
when I talk about you,
carsick by your side.
Last year, a single year. While night, while
my husband worried all for nothing,
you were there and drove
that winter—rigid, escalating to a streak.
Parked it beneath my horse-
print scarf
and their unfixed postures,
none of whom were just yet grief.
None I recognised
as manic. I bathed
in those days like a thrush in marbles.
Could not walk
up the stairs like that, recall the room
that had the basil, or where I'd left
what you would bring me, anyway—storch
of sadness. You occur to me like a clave
does to a clave. Is this question, or desire:
what heart will lisp through my hands—
whose face between these night-lose
thirds? Fake, but with such true intention.
Isn't that enough?
You have spooned me like a pear
in spring, haven’t you?—you have! If I had an ear
like a magpie in the mist
of my husband's mouth, I'd tell this London
artist that no one, up to this hour,
from the moment he had sketched me,
had called
me Jonah, Giona, or Jojo, when
it is, in fact, late, I am weary—August is over
and looking for me, all that dead
bread in the toaster is burning again.

Worry Barn

Slowly to my courage,
I climb the duckboards
like a deer into a late October
tree. Or a hand across the black
of an electric piano. Slouch
myself over a shrivelled pint.
Honey, the birds are building barns.
Honey, if I had nothing else,
I'd eat the grain from the paper
of the first year of our marriage.
I am always elsewhere when you call,
moving there, airy supplement for
airy supplement—I am cableless.
Walletless by the riverbank across you,
empty socks beneath the bed, and
I cannot what I cannot.
What if I did? Bring you coffee
tomorrow and all of our—
what if all of our
hydrangeas turned blue?