Lives Ebbing

Toward Death and Glazed Light

You took your long turn to sickenand thin, honed toward deathand glazed light; fine boneor Meissen, the merest breath

of teacup barely keeping the shapeof your hot sweet pour.But I'm not done, you keptsaying, your tray borne

away, clearing off everythingthat gave you pleasure: clotted cream,buttered crumbs, honey, and ginsenglicked off your thumb, one last

long drag of sweet dark smoke;you wanted to have your cake.

"The Kiss"

—after Chekhov

Just the rustle of silk in the dark—lilac,he thought, no, perhaps it was black—and the smell of poplar and grass,a whispered at last, soft circling arms, lipsbreathing into the unbilleted collar

of the short lynx-whiskered lieutenant,too timid to take what was offered. The onewho brushed his beard and boots and dreamton his horse in the pot-rattled cavalcade,who dreamt of a dawn sung by nightingales

and steeped in poplar and grass, one profusehour that overwhelmed the broad banksof the Volga. One brief May melt and, look,twelve vernal springs, all things wantingto pout and split, buds swelling bare branches—

but it was after all best, Ryabovich thought,to be left not knowing each last least thing—the cut and fret of the lacethe next wanton night might have worn,the untraced shape of her other hip bone.

How many stairs he'd climbed inside the hours,the doors he'd tried. Whether what he saw,he saw clearly or was by his body blinded.Where it began—in chance or love or lustin the dark—where, in the end, they ended.