In some other life, I can hear you

breathing: a pale sound like running

fingers through tangled hair. I dreamt

again of swimming in the quarry

& surfaced here when you called for me

in a voice only my sleeping self could

know. Now the dapple of the aspen

respires on the wall & the shades cut

its song a staff of light. Leave me—

that me—in bed with the woman

who said all the sounds for pleasure

were made with vowels I couldn’t

hear. Keep me instead with this small sun

that sips at the sky blue hem of our sheets

then dips & reappears: a drowsy penny

in the belt of Venus, your aureole nodding

slow & copper as it bobs against cotton

in cornflower or clay. What a waste

the groan of the mattress must be

when you backstroke into me & pull

the night up over our heads. Your eyes

are two moons I float beneath & my lungs

fill with a wet hum your hips return.

It’s Sunday—or so you say with both hands

on my chest—& hot breath is the only hymn

whose refrain we can recall. And then you

reach for me like I could’ve been another

man. You make me sing without a sound.

apricots & brown teeth in browner mouths nashing dates & a clementine’s underflesh under yellow nail & dates like auntie heads & the first time someone dried mango there was god & grandma’s Sunday only song & how the plums are better as plums dammit & i was wrong & a June’s worth of moons & the kiss stain of the berries & lord the prunes & the miracle of other people’s lives & none of my business & our hands sticky and a good empty & please please pass the bowl around again & the question of dried or ripe & the sex of grapes & too many dates & us us us us us & varied are the feast but so same the sound of love gorged & the women in the Y hijab a lily in the water & all of us who come from people who signed with x’s & yesterday made delicacy in the wrinkle of the fruit & at the end of my name begins the lot of us

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.