Hearing for Impacted Parties at the Department of Natural Resources

Banging my soft temple against love’s hip bone

I put down roots. Booklet of IWW songs.

Soft tofu. DayQuil. Our throats

are clearing. Beyond the glass

two fawns meet at the confluence of two

minor rivers. Crinkling like the day after

Easter chocolates we inscribe with the names

of dead birds. Resurrection tires. Love’s calloused hands

echo back, ducks in a room

of sky. The ungovernable landscapes

speak for themselves. Chew the minutes. Violin filling

neighborhood air. We are hearing

spruce. We are hearing maple.

Shower

It’s here, amidst the bubbles and fog, the impossible

loofah, the conditioner, slowly running out of promises,

here, as the hairy cheek of an ass might brush against

the uneven tile grouting, which I know to be uneven for I have studied it

with a fingertip, the way one would a lover’s eyebrow

bone, out of which grow hairs dark and sharpened

into approximately symmetrical lines against which I rest

my wettening, my scrubbing – here, I’ve done my best

work. Music falls like freshly shorn hair

until the words overflow soapy hands and you run

sopping, slippery, towel-less across the night’s tiles. You,

in whose sparkling tracks I’ve fallen. We saved water

showering together, saved soap. Nowadays, there’s always a risk

of rain. April showers bring May showers, I’ve decided to be more open

to golden showers, the flowers need a chance to breathe, the streets

are overrun with murkiness, cherry blossoms, love

bites until I shrivel, I raisin, I drain. I was naked

when the house filled with smoke and the gutter gratings unscrewed

in the flood. I emerge from summer showers and remain

wet. Lint, papers, cotton rounds stick to my fish skin born

into the humidity of the world. I am in love with the possibility

of dressing. I am in love with return. Forgetting how a hand looks

and the belly of the knee, and the crust of an ear –

I am flaking. You said we’d never get old and we won’t stop

kissing, toweling each other off. Soft membrane, do you

write on wide ruled lines, do you teethe, do you rub

the red from your lips, the kohl from your eyes? Everything happens

behind the curtain, and like my mother taught me, I bow before

and after. And every August, when I was a kid,

my mother stopped the Honda at that old Jersey diner,

arced her arm across the neon parking lot above my head

and held it, ready to trace the expectant Perseids. I’m still there,

grasping your ankles, awaiting their embrace.