How Men Die
Picture this:
You're in bed,
half naked already, your hand
a trembling bird, nesting
at last in the robe-veiled
small of her back. Your
woman, your wife
of ten long years, married
long enough to know better
than to take a moment like this
for granted, long enough to know
just how unlikely
such moments become
in a house with children
being raised like sturdy walls
between you, where jobs
calcify into careers, and where
bills, routines, even shopping, TV,
accumulate like dust in all the spaces
where surprises used to hide. But now,
In this rare moment, your eyes
are tracing the flow
of her hair down the curve of her back,
and her shoulders, bent forward
because she is not facing you
(she is sitting up, smoking, her back curled away from you)
press her breasts fiercely
against the thin white cotton
of her gown, and fire
trickles up into your hips, your chest, then
down into your legs, and pretty soon
your hand on her back is moving, and words
Fly from your opened mouth:
Your face
is art to me, your body
my temple. Your breasts
my religion, Holy Sacrament, Holy altar
of my Holy Male Desire. Let me
worship you, unbridled. This fire
leaping from my fingers
and my Holy Male tongue
the very song that shaped Creation
the god in me delights in singing
to the goddess inside you. Let me
play you now like music. Let me
enter you like breath, o goddess!
welcome me like unexpected rain…
And then you see:
She has not heard you, as if
your words have strayed so far
from expectations that she simply
missed them, or they
missed her, flitting past
the wall of her back
like tremulous birds,
tracing one quick flight
around the sturdy room then out
to shiver beneath the eaves of the garage.
And then she speaks:
At your age, she says,
expertly lining up the crosshairs,
don't you think it’s time
you grew up a little?
And then you know:
Her loaded grow up
will sing harmlessly overhead, for
at your age
has already opened
like a pit-snare there
in the middle of the bed,
and you've already fallen
further than you could have imagined
when your hand, like a bird,
only moments before,
began its brash ascent toward her hair.
And as the ground swallows you
and the earth closes over you
and the grass leaps up to hide you, and she's
alone there in the bed, but for
a flightless ghost beside her
You can't help thinking:
This is how men die, gradually
impaled on the whetted tips
of a thousand small diminishings –
And you can't help wondering
as your hand, now just a hand,
worms its dull way toward the lightswitch,
how long a lifeless body mourns
remembrance of a soul, less freed
to rise like some eternal, fiery bird
than smothered like an unrequited prayer.