Your room dissolves into grey smears.
I am disturbed by the way
you are showing yourself to the world.
Above the waist you
are a mannerist gesture of pallor;
your hair, your mouth,
your eyes are a study in palpability.
But your nipples have hardened,
and blunt as a piece of jewelry
is the little black camera
you raise in your hand like a gift,
a grenade aimed at yourself—
at both of us—in your looking-glass world.

Meadows of bramble scorch
in the eye. But it is midwinter, this
morning air that locks us
to the blue of brook pebbles. We are
hard and small things, things
shaped by our involuntary
clenching, things we or someone has bought.

Last night I pinned you,
Henut, my hands and knees proving me
right in my mind and in
my manhood. But your breath jumped
like quaking stones, and
an ancient fear bucked my dead weight.
I have gathered up my life
for this, riding the landslip of your
visions, my fingers wrenching
the berries from your fists and heart.

The wind at the shutters
was sea-green and stretched long
over the sagging hulks of salmon-boats.
Dark braided heads bobbed
among the firs, there
where the cities and their enormous
traffic were yet to rise. There
I stood at the vault's door,
heading the line of dead— the prospectors,
lumbermen, hotelkeepers, bankers, pimps,
their frock coats floury with waiting
and their high collars yellow
at their leather throats. I knelt
at the cairn of split clams.
The slow air wept
in the shore's raised limbs.

What I had of you then was this pose:
a cloudbank of pale blossom,
a rush of wind-bleached sheets, your hand
in your lap's saline hollow
a curious driftwood.

I look for the last time
and your tangle of fantasy underwear,
your blurred knees, the dark
unfocus of your crotch. The clock shudders
on the mantel with a shriek of ratchets.
Your shredded self portrait
flutters from my hands.