Cocktails with Orpheus

After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves—the part that stood

naked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcée who owned

a gun, O Miss Geneva where are you now—Orpheus says she did

not perish, she was not turned to ash in the brutal light, she found

a good job, she made good money, she had her own insurance and

a house, she was a decent wife. I know descent lives in the word

decent. The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus hands

me his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mind

I am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound

as touch permits, saying don't forget me when I become the liquid

out of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet and animal-made.

I want to be a human above the body, uprooted and right, a fold

of pleas released, but I am a black wound, what's left of the deed.