You please me well, but not as well
as coffee in bed and a book. You interest me
but not as much as a movie in the dark
with myself and no one else in the theater.
You make me hungry but so does a good, hard
swim in a chilly pool. You surprise
but not like a sudden rain on a bike
when I’m just about to overtake my friend.
You call to me, cooing, but I prefer the doves
with their perfect love as they walk
along the curb in their grey morning jackets
then take off like shuttlecocks. And still you call,
still I answer. One night last week
I thought I’d break through this fantod,
like visiting again and again the limits
and diminishments of middle age;
we were making love
and I wanted to kiss you with all my might
not as if you or I were someone else
but as though underneath our modest
wardrobes, subdued and secondhand,
a paradise of desire awaited us, opened
piñata of an argument that ends in passion.
I drowned you about the mouth, I took
away your choice, as if
you didn’t need will anymore and only wished
to dispense with it, free
of an old prohibition.
For that moment, pinned and pressed, repeatedly
thirsting for me to stop, you let me feel your eyes
open waiting for my return, not imploring
or fearing. Then with both hands
you moved me, slightly at first, as one inches
away from the dead
to test the lasting change
come over only one, both in the same battle.
You spoke my name, but you turned it
into a question. I’m here, I said, it’s still
me, and I came back to you just the same.
My body part goes
inside your body part
a key goes inside a lock
a hand, etc., its glove
the gasoline goes inside the tank
and the nozzle goes back to the square-
shouldered pump the dollars
go into the register
the milk goes in the glass
the knife in the chest some
know what that feels like
the dying know what it means
to pass beyond the need
for a mirror to know themselves
as they at last are
the body goes inside the coffin
a weevil inside the bole
a worm enters the cabbage
rides the waxen waves
the sound goes into the whorls
of the ear
the seed goes inside the pit
inside the womb
a father goes in the wake of the seed
a mother goes in the take of the egg
but in my house
alone at the end of the week
the last hour of the week
Sunday midnight
small red lamp on the mantle
the static of silence
nothing goes here
Steven Schreiner teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His recent poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Tar River Poetry, River Styx, Cardinal Points, The 2River View, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of Natural Bridge, a journal of contemporary literature.
