Watermark: Poems

In the third night of heart-attack dreams
(hearts cracking in the shell of the body)

I get out of my bed and watch the pale
cracked egg of the moon. I picture you

at your desk in the prison, holding this
poem in one hand, reading. You reach out

the other, spread wide like a fan, and touch
these words on the page. (I see my heart

in your hand like an egg, pulsing, blue
and untouched.) A poem is thin,

translucent as skin at the wrist, a blue
arterial map of the coursing of blood

from the heart to the reaching limbs
of the body, channels of veins pulsing back

to the hollow muscle of heart. I think
about touch and the pretense

of touching. I think of the graying
and thinning of hair, how it touches the two

lobes of the ear. I think of your voice
on the wire through the air, the feel of it

rough through my hair to the ear,
how it enters my body and follows the flow

of veins to my heart, through flexible vessels
of blood, to my double-lobed, four-chambered

heart. I climb from my membrane of sheets
in the night, to sit at a desk in the cell

of my house, to tell you (the blue translucence
of eggs) your heart beats oblique

in its restless cage, small as your hand,
or mine, and it grows, heavier, wider

deeper with time (you hold in your broad,
tangible hand, this delicate skin, reading

these thin blue lines down the page) ticking
with mortal fragility.

Click the image to see credits & larger sizes at flickr.

Watermark