The Home Front, 1992

The way you hold your wrists as if expecting some heavy gift— a basket of bread that sounds hollow when you tap on it, golden and feathered on the tongue, a split plum too juicy for the thin skin to hold it in, frozen grapes with their silvered glow. We lie there, and you tell a story about a desert you walked in, something terrible happened that you won’t name, but lingers like a pall in the air, a stone held under your tongue you suck on to taste its salt. Once you said “I didn’t know anyone who died.” I thought you were telling me you were lucky, but really you were saying you didn’t know anyone you’d killed. In the mornings, you turn your back to me, cupping your coffee. You like to look at trains, you like to watch the blackbirds rise from the onion fields at the edge of town, half in love with how they hold themselves together yet so apart. I can already see the time I won’t know you anymore, when I’ll mistake your back for the back of a different man. Once you said you found a dead horse out there; someone had wrapped a scarf of blue silk around its neck; that was love, you knew it, and you sat there alone a long time until they came to drag you back. I already see when all this will be gone—a memory like a coin at the bottom of a fountain covered in moss. I already know what I will keep— an image of red birds in heavy snow, pecking the ground for a seed that skitters away, just out of reach. Down by the river a person flapping their arms in blue light.