The Wall

One night from the other side

of a motel wall made of nothing but

sawdust and pink stuff, I

listened as a man cried

to someone on the telephone

that all he wanted

to do before he died

was to come home.

“I want to come home!”

That night a man cried

until I was ankle-deep in sleep,

and then up to my neck, wading

like a swimmer

or like a suicide

through the waves

of him crying

and into the deep

as icebergs cracked into halves,

as jellyfish, like thoughts, were

passed secretly between people.

And the seaweed, like

the sinuous soft green hair

of certain beauty queens,

washed up by the sea.

Except that we

were in Utah, and one of us

was weeping

while the other one

was sleeping, with

nothing but a thin, dry

wall between us.