love

Darling
wrote a note.
With mention of a gentle coat
in dark overtures of the ending
we saw purple and gold
at the length of the docks
stripped of paint and people.

You and your wormwood,
old dreams from 19th century canticles
exhumed from dusty bards
spent on life.

Old movies we had never helped much,
those drunken songs of light and sound
could figure out only the depth of our agitations
as we sat in dark rooms coughing up spit
with the blood of our past
while some jeremaid couple
told us to quiet down for the sake
of their undereducated kids.

Should have sang
when we got close
to clotheslines strung out in the snow
and broken dressers left on lake ice
where a desperate few had frozen
in their last stand of love affairs
like ice held above water
in a vodka that dissolves the dissolute frostbite
of that intemperate heart of doubt

we knew
only about the prefigured stars
held like icicles drifting in concealment
of proportion.
you could make a lion
looking at all those jewels
stretched out
in the frostbitten loam

though you made your vows
and i had one secret assurance
in the thoughtless lips of a slow kiss
that rotated like gravity's flow
through the emptiness of the individual