Evening Lounge

after the painting by Brent Lynch

The humid nights are best and worst, best

because the birds sing at two in the morning when

you cannot get back into the other world, worst

because it is the moist heat that makes the skin supple,

makes you want to rub against someone else, a woman,

and there is nothing but the long list of lost chances,

things you could have said, perhaps the simple question

of will you sleep with me so that it is not just you

and this shell of a home, this place where it feels

the walls are another layer of my skin, and that is neither

best or worst. It is the holding of the dead stink,

the memories that was over him, holding them back.

It is the utter singleness of being the only person

here, the way the thoughts think themselves down to

accepting that this is really just me here wondering who I am,

just me here wondering why I am awake at two,

which trigger it was, knowing all the time all too well

the way the war of life is connected to the nervous system

of the world, the ganglia of our shared horrors, either

mine so large, or so people tell me, and here it seems

to be the membrane between the skin of my bones

and the skin of this home, the absorbing shock of space

that gives when the memories burn their way in or

out of me. I would lie here wondering how to tell her

I am wrestling with the angel, wrestling with memories

in the crevices and cracks of my body, of how I feel

right now, what it felt like then, in those times, and I am

glad she is not here, and I wish she were here, and she

has no name because this is some woman I do not know.

I practice in the silence of my thoughts the different pitch

and rhythm of how I might ask will you sleep with me,

afraid of what to say should she say yes and this decade

of my monkish life should lie open and I have to say why

I am sitting on the edge of the bed, why I have woke her from

the sweet smile I assume she has when I assume her horror

is smaller than mine.

Source: The Government of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)