On Moving

The stillness before it hits


The storm is coming;
I can hear it in the music, the voice
speaking clearly on the stereo, patiently waiting
in her speaker-houses; it is written
in my old pairs of briefs, almost as concisely
as the name would suggest.

And when it’s come, my blood will run.
Notes will come out of my orifices, my mouth
will run dry with lists
and forgotten loved-one objects, that scarcely
remember the hand that handed them to me, delicate,
gracefullly waiting for reimbursment, or
just the gamble of love.

And when it’s gone, I’ll hold no one’s hand, because
the flesh will have blanched, too embarassing
to call out, not dire enough
to alert the neighbors. Everything I’ve been
will fall into neatly dismembered boxes, the vile smell
of the innards of my home, the discarded litter
of living. A photo album that I don’t recognize.
Sheets I never washed, never touched again, only
to remember the stain.

The storm is coming, even the bugs agree, singing
with their gentle staccato love songs in the humid
dark of Michigan. They will not miss me.
By the time I return, they will all be dust. By the time
this has been read,
my life will have rusted over like silk carefully fit around metal,
the art of watching what the stains have been,
and how today has changed everything, a lake forming
on the surface of the earth, the sense
that even if I bleed everything into the ground, darkening
the entire night, only a slight exhalation will remain,
suggesting the frame of someone in a doorway,
the sound of feet in an empty house.