Crepuscule with Muriel

Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milk-

silk whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six

o'clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block,

cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk,

cup of a cut brown loaf, of a slice, a lack

of butter, blueberry jam that's almost black,

instead of tannin seeping into the cracks

of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out, infects

the slit of a cut I haven't the wit to fix

with a surgeon's needle threaded with fine-gauge silk

as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock.

But no key threads the cylinder of a lock.

Late afternoon light, transitory, licks

the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks

itself out beneath the wheel's revolving spoke.

Taut thought's gone, with a blink of attention, slack,

a vision of "death and distance in the mix"

(she lost her words and how did she get them back

when the corridor of a day was a lurching deck?

The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics

she translated to a syntax which connects

intense and unfashionable politics

with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex;

then the short-circuit of the final stroke,

the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke).

What a gaze out the window interjects:

on the southeast corner, a black Lab balks,

tugged as the light clicks green toward a late-day walk

by a plump brown girl in a purple anorak.

The Bronx-bound local comes rumbling up the tracks

out of the tunnel, over west Harlem blocks

whose windows gleam on the animal warmth of bricks

rouged by the fluvial light of six o'clock.

Source: Desperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2003)