Leaving the University Gym

not understanding how we celebrate

Our bodies. Every day we separate.

      — Marilyn Hacker

September, and the great stillness 

of moonless night and cooling air, the city 

in blue pockets in the hills, and just 

under your hands, the current

of what’s forgotten. All week long, while 

you were running, or reading, your forefinger

blurring the type, one season was slipping 

into another, as lovers weave themselves 

across a bed, odor of yeast 

from the beer bread lifting through 

the oven, the dog’s pad cracked, and in

class, you were watching one student 

blink at another. There’s a time 

to believe in love, you’d thought, 

watching her rub her arm hair, and him 

shift in his shirt, but then you believe all

things end, and you’d tried so carefully

to explain what Marilyn Hacker meant,

how we “wake to ourselves, exhausted, 

in the late,” before you thought better

about it, staring down the rows, and cited

the fused limbs, and raised unlettered power

instead, the poem’s words comets’ tails

on blackboard. Now, you are finally leaving 

campus, content this time your heart 

has bettered the howl for sugar, your body 

hot from the work of itself, when you push 

through the glass door into fall—

and you remember a draft which was

just like this once, when, past 

the dorm curfew, Tim was clutching 

your elbows beside a lake, the air cricket

-thick, Cassiopeia encrusted in her collar. 

There is no loneliness as knowing. Years

later, when you were drunk yet again, 

at Le Lido, swimming the booth, 

the waiter—cloudy in his captain’s suit—sat 

with you. The gold-enameled dancer

was still mounting her white horse. He poured     

the champagne. You sipped it softly.

Their muscles erupted into the shivering

other as they strutted circles against

the stage, animal and woman, and you were 

grateful no one said a word. How 

could you have named the chill

of her breasts, the terrible hot fur? 

It was that gift of silence which happens

between strangers, out of country. Then 

you’d walked home, tall cathedrals

bristling in the baubles of their unrung

bells. You’d turned your collar up 

against the coming cold as you turn

up your jacket now, surprised

by the suddenness of the season 

(or your own inattention to the small

shifts), your breath crystal in air—

and each stripe, marking separation

down the asphalt, is lamped

and glistening, eerie as snow, solstice

certain as the short drive ahead, to when

you must walk up to your dark, quiet

house, sink your key into the lock.