Jasmin et Cigarette

Since hitting that deer outside your city, I’ve learned to measure
the distance between us
by counting roadkill. Engulfed tonight
in the perfume you left in my medicine cabinet,
I drive through sleep’s red edge
past twenty-two small lives splayed open on asphalt. I’m drawn
to your wrist by indolic jasmine, tobacco, and—trust a man
to bottle it—the first faint hints of cunt. The pressure
of your phallus against my thigh
elicits from my tuneless maw a song.

But our time together is mostly spent.

You watch medical lectures at double speed, taking notes
in your dissector.
I wash dishes.

Looking over your shoulder as a scalpel
separates embalmed skin from fascia and nerve,
it occurs to me: all we are is smeared out there on the road.

We discuss anesthesia.

Dispensing the drugs safely
requires an obsessive precision
we share. A lucrative career for you.
I could write without worry, you say,
knowing the cost of keeping a body,
how little might be left for language
after the daily labor of living
a little longer—as if either of us believe
in any such after, as if the last thing we share
is not this compulsion to study the corpses
of people we might have known,
to scoop out handfuls of white matter
so like our own bodies
as to leave each of us shaking
in a separate silence. We do this
because we share an ethic
of ending things gently—
if not without pain,
at least
with an exacting tenderness.