From “Winter with Ovid”

When Ovid drives the Buick, it is from one sharp end

          of Boston to the Cape—as if he must escape the city’s hull, its concrete ribs.

                           Light rain in the wind whiplashes our faces with

the cruel erotics of winter.

It is the weekend two antlered elks crashed

into the Charles River

                       like a shock of meteorites. Ovid wheels the car across

a mesh of hide & sirens, wind from idling pine trees nudges us toward his own neck of the woods.

                   He takes me because I’ve asked to be taken, because when he said

                    he loved me I demanded backbone & ligament to every verb,

demanded wrought steel, hard shell, bark. Constancy, like the rhythm daylight affords.

                                   For the first time since I entered America, my mother’s voice recedes.

                 & mine, too, receding with its recurring gong

                                          of anxiety. Shame is a weeping fox in the forests of what-will-be.

_____

I lived for an interminable period inside his blue pajamas.

                   The fabric, crunchy with dry sweat or semen with nowhere else to go.

His crotch, a patch of fescue. It smelled like the longest day

                         in June. On the internet, the idea of hookup was polling mixed

                                                       reviews because of the emergent plague. Its final tally

             hovered between plain indulgence & necessity. Ovid stayed home. Mostly.

I would pick scatterings of splintered almonds off his beefy stomach.

       But once the site cleared, he’d release a cottony cry & replace the halved almonds

with whole nuts coated with dark chocolate. Those ones I ate, too.

                                            A thin line of cocaine sometimes, a shake of coarse salt

on bowls of Ben & Jerry’s, thawed & frotted & frozen again

              —he insisted the hard, chunky salt grains stayed hard & chunky,

                         although it was me who ate, who gagged, who puckered my mouth

when the minerals scratched open blisters that had almost healed.

_____

After watching another episode of Suits & then

another episode of Suits, Ovid retreats to the backyard

to split firewood. The night before,

while it snowed & the apartment begged for a living source of heat, a neighbor

         had lent him a hatchet.

It is the neighbor who plays his selection of jazz

                   records out loud so that pieces of Coltrane drift

beyond his window and settle on the avenues with the last of the autumn leaves,

the same neighbor who, upon learning of my writing dreams, 

     stacked our front porch with his dog-eared editions of Schlegel,

Rilke, & Apollinaire.

With his bare hands, Ovid breaks the lean branches

               from the source of their dead weight.

Bark all dry & brittle. The scraggly & stubborn leaves he plucks & separates

from the main stems. When he lifts the hatchet at last, his cuts are precise;

                 the logs hurt to be splintered

but they hurt more to be splintered with such finesse for nothing.

Meanwhile, woodpeckers & then more woodpeckers convene

           in the overhead truss, sitting through

hours of idle chatter. He enters the brightness of sudden snow.