Niagara
Honeymoon
That night, unlike
other nights, I woke near dawn.
I knew this and that’s
all I knew: I had exhausted my luck. I lost. I was done.
Write me a letter when
you get there. That’s what you told me. I didn’t. Time had morphed into
wicker
Esperanto on Elba. Twilit June settling on the island; all that heat
and dust,
the tide, those sharp rocky beaches. As if I were nowhere, the idiot
neant
in a face struck by coffee, a face in stark hot despair.
Was this a dream, my
dream, despite my desire to forget it: Scene 3 -- the lip of the crag,
waters
ragging; whipped by the spray, toppling over…
I want to keep you
close, superfluous, paltry...
Tintype binoculars
wobble along the transept.
There they are again:
yellow sheep shivering under fluorescent bulbs.
Through that doorway,
the slaughterhouse...
Niagara honeymoon;
that’s what the brochure said. I held it up to you, above me, your face
the
face of the moon.
But it was our face,
not mine, that cinched to its nautical height the fictive flood, which
you
gave, breaking apart, your lips curling, teeth glinting, a nose like
some
shattered upland headstone.
Hope?
No hope.
Don’t get me wrong. I
just don’t like charades. And in truth, I don’t like you.
I never did.