Forbearance

We’ve stopped talking again
so the earth has no color.
Everywhere the chlorophyll has paused,
light burning over the day’s lessons
as hunger burns
the mouth I can’t make eat.
A little rice? A little soup?
I’d rather die
reading the early texts
you sent about my breasts.
I wouldn’t take a picture—
infidelity!—
and so instead had conjured them
with words,
for which, with words,
you gave me back a tongue
we dragged across the skin
of common thought.
Such is our lot,
our shared disease or gift.
Like Bernini’s angels
propped somewhere in Rome
across a nave
we fetishize remove,
which keeps the ideal possible,
the possible ideal.
So why is life so dull without your veins?
Today on Twelfth the drugstore glass
reflects a woman braced
against a private wind:
the wind of her conscience, maybe,
spinning on the mandrel of desire.
Later, she opens mail.
She shops for artichokes and squash,
fingering their grooves
for information from the flesh.
The life I love cannot include you,
she wants to say,
but because we are not speaking
she must say it into the poem,
whose possibilities contract
with every word.
Watch it narrow even as it grows.
This is the terror—
granite, pixels, blighted grass—
this is the terror
choices make of lives.