CONJUNCTIONS
The day you said you loved
someone else
we were watching them land on the
moon.
They kept mocking it up
but we knew the real thing
because it wasn't clear.
Someone else, you said,
I met her walking down the
street.
They were wandering around
leaving footprints.
In a thousand years of sunspots,
meteorites, solar wind,
there'll still be those flat
scars.
All of a sudden someone else.
We can't watch the crescent belly
out
and pretend a man never touched
her.
I knew I should have stayed a
virgin:
barebreasted, hourglass,
Minoan,
I would dance alone till
power welled up in me like
handfuls of snakes.
I should have stayed outside your
touch
like those acrobats vaulting
immune
through the lunar horns of the
bull.
I'd have seen her first.
We'd have linked arms
you wouldn't see anything,
occulted, our bright light
canceled
in double brilliance.
Some meetings are inevitable.
We swing towards each other,
can't prevent
the apparent kiss of our separate
momentums,
our inevitable onward retreat,
our retrograde attentions.
So what if I saw you dancing
on the far side of the room
as if it was the only place lit?
The universe is swelling,
Nothing pushes us apart.
So what if you said we hurtle
together
across centuries of space ?
The moon shines her lie of
adoration
always hiding her face.
I learn to die every month with
my blood
and rise up, hair like snakes,
electric.
The gravity of our attraction
diminishes with the inverse
square of time.
Some desire to desire remains
like penumbra,
bodies crossing out of the cone
of extinction.
We keep our distance.
Any touching is only apparent:
the light touch of the bulldancer
at Knossos,
conjunction of bison and arrow on
a cave wall.
