Designed for Flight: Poems

I Should Be Livid

58 I Should Be Livid With water in my lungs I come, with two ring fingers and kneecaps shaved by grit, I come with special knowledge: the heart has no fields but it does no medicinal herbs or poppies bloom there but they do. I should be livid for you wedged yourself between me and the mausoleums of beehives and the sheet music on the flanks of trout you brushed aside the lizard prizing open dawn. I am certain you made a clod of me letting the woos go on after the blood had cooled—damn I see now we were tourists of affection, never true inhabitants of that storied realm, never citizens in the . . . wait, life’s too short for prose. I still miss your jutting second toes. Like oceans though we must make visible only a fraction of our losses, grind them into sandy coasts. I should be livid yet after parting I did not feel 59 like a current inside large water, alive but bound on every side, or used by you, who surely rode me in leisure for a time before tying to a sturdy dock. ...