valentine 2/13/08

Valentine

The blueberries you ate were bitter.
Each helpless blister burst beneath your perfect teeth
and the red dust stained your gray sweaters.
So when you said you couldn’t taste anything,
I made you a cake entirely of sugar
and it caved in the middle, in spite of it’s sweetness.

“What is the point?” you asked, “When I’m not going to eat it anyway?”

You wanted a poet.
You wanted a piece of history.
You were willing to make a wager.
It seemed easy to see my name in print.
In the between Cartier and downtown loft ads in some magazine
or on the marriage certificate as you reached for the next available ship
to whose oars you would cling.
This was not my maiden voyage,
you preferred a scuffed schooner.

“What’s the point?” you asked, “We were heading straight for the rocks anyway.”

In that gray cotton darkness of your bedroom,
Me, in a familiar haze,
a story of gunfire and scorned women staying remarkably afloat in my mind,
I tried to reach into you
but our spines, like those twin pisces,
lay in desperate parallel.
You apologized, the night after
drunk and screaming affection into the receiver
and promised me dinner.
I’d make you buy me wine,
I was becoming accustomed to bitter reds.