The Poem Complains to Its Reader

You promised the automobile and TV
made me relevant again. If I could recite
the cast of Three’s Company or Cops,
you would listen the way mothers do
when children first start asking questions
about God. Well, I did God. I did every species
of bird. I spent decades on my father’s
drinking, the pancake-sized hole it blasted
in my spirit. I did beauty. I did forgiveness.
I spent one hundred years on mental imbalance,
that wheel barrow full of water, whole
milennia on battles won and lost, the warrior
burned, maimed, or killed.

I’m about to return
to western wind, to where it will blow, to the shape
of my lover’s breath and my lover’s sumptuous
hip on that white-hot Greek island
white and hot six hundred years before Christ.
I’m starting to doubt you ever wanted
delivery from despair, the re-arranged
constellation, the unified self. All those mornings
I walked the dog by your apartment, the window
open, your TV blasting out a game show
into the blather of that street, I wondered
if you ever wanted to get up from your salty
or sugary snack and follow me
follow the dog through the rich smells
of this life. I thought I saw you twitch once,
just a little, in the chair. You almost rose,
I thought you were coming, but then
the flashing lights.

They arrested me
for peeping. Three hours of a rubber hose
and finally I gave away our pact. They couldn’t
believe either that you ever meant to pay
attention. Why would you, the cops said. Why would
anyone get up from the cockpit of their Sony
for an analog voice. Then they offered
coffee and that sweet non-dairy creamer,
and we talked about human frailty
before they locked me up with drunks and johns
and kooks in the basement of their station,
where quiet moaners and I stood awake
all night above the vomit on the floor, afraid
for our lives, watching Larry King.

I think
we need to talk, to renegotiate
our bargain. I’m really all about you,
if you let me. We made that deal, you remember,
during the long blackout too many
summers ago. You felt for me in the dark,
and I talked back, reciting from memory,
rich as crushed rosemary, hot as a flush blooming
chest to face. That was the night we told
our secrets, left our lines and stanzas
on each others’ bodies. When the light returned,
you pretended you never knew me, and you don’t
answer your phone. I’m out here in wind
stiffer than my father’s first drink. He used
to beat me, you know, then he turned
to ashes dumped from a canoe and falling now
in an ever-thinning cloud to lake-bottom.
I’m out here in wind stiffer than Beowulf’s
crossing. I’m the absent field, the ethereal city.
Cars race down these avenues stirring up
their blizzard of ephemera. The world
is too much with me.

I would have you turn my way
like the summer sunflower. Or I would shine
back at you like the moon, like still water.
Either way, I need you to pick up. I don’t want
to have to keep punching redial
over and over. My therapist suggests
I act less compulsively these days. Besides,
the court order does not allow
my simply stopping by
some evening, inviting myself inside.