The Flurry

When we talk about when to tell the kids,

we are so together, so concentrated.

I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m

the killer”—taking my wrist—he says,

holding it. He is sitting on the couch,

the old indigo chintz around him,

rich as a night sea with jellies,

I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him,

as if within some chamber of matedness,

some dust I carry around me. Tonight,

to breathe its Magellanic field is less

painful, maybe because he is drinking

a wine grown where I was born—fog,

eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m

sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch

my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want

to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that,

I tell him I will try to fall out of

love with him, but I feel I will love him

all my life. He says he loves me

as the mother of our children, and new troupes

of tears mount to the acrobat platforms

of my ducts and do their burning leaps.

Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a

moment, I imagine a flurry

of tears like a whirra of knives thrown

at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt

of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod

to it, it is my hope.