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Who Knew the Water
- Ohio University Press
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11 Who Knew the Water I’m calling sleep because I’ve been dreaming of you with some strange drink—honey, bees’ blood, you’re keeping me up all night. How your thin shoulders, like two extinct birds, tore down through the sun into the quarries. How you’d hive from head to toe all over, from dove to red. You said shit like bless you, swan-diving off the drop-off we called Shangri-La, palms spread and taunting. Inside that water: tools, bottles, clothing, and leaves. What took us there: black tie highway stretched out, ironed, calling us to summer. Us figuring those clay and silt cradles home, just lost enough. I miss your shoulders, your turned unaging back. Since you stopped writing I pretend I see you out of the corner of my eye— they water with the ragweed wind. I’m left like this, you planning to return as if for keys, never to be unearthed from the couch cushions. A gracious bowing out: your corners to stay for me wrinkleless, your fever-yellowed, crooked grin the same. Look, you: call. You, who’ve made 12 the pilgrimage to forget, think of us licking salt off the other’s wrist. Remember noon, hand slipped between your legs like note folded into envelope; remember sliding between fence slats, rusted nails never claiming a knee. Even then you knew the water would be the end of us. ...