Sex

It is hard to make this choice

when the room is so small and bright,

and the outside big and deep.

But I have not taught myself

to lie on the earth and feel

how much greater it is than me.

And I can’t help following the sky

with my eyes as it moves past me,

and I can’t help closing my eyes to imagine

the boat that carries me to the middle

of a lake as dark as the gaps between the clouds.

I forget everything I have learned

about how to hold myself

at the last edges of sensation

when not so long ago I held

the small hands of a child

and taught her to play a clapping game,

when I stood before a storm of scalding water

that would have killed me

if I gave it the mistake it looked for.

After all this time, we still must love and eat,

and none of us is alone.

See why I create these places where I am a stone.

In the bed, soft against the side

where I make the dark blanket more beautiful

and the sheet a pale and magnificent drawing,

there is nowhere to wrap the part of myself

that understands the handshake of  joy

in my arms and hold her while she cries.

The sink is running in the next room

and the walls are flashed with what the world does at night.

Too much of us is evident in this hour

and I am sick with a cold fever

that hasn’t broken since I was a girl

who loved how good it was to sleep

on the floor, so near to the silent ground.

Still, the boat, and the dark water

that has its private depth.

It never tries to carry me anywhere.

It makes the wind wait in the trees.