Collected Stories
The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer
—Walt Whitman
After a day of walking through sun-clutched Virginia, you unlatch
your wool coat and hang it from the ladder. The sleeves of your
blue Oxford rolled back from your wrists.
You yawn and beneath your arms, round stains—dark and greener,
as if rubbed with grass. Bitter-smelling, orange and lunchmeat,
the locomotive power of deodorant hurrying after!
And in the night when someone is fucking next door, we close our
ears with foam. You fall asleep within minutes. But I carry the
night around in my mouth awhile, like dog who has hunted
down a bird.
I know your body is a basin.
That after midnight your creases dampen and unleash the waters of
the earth. The oceans, the creeks and channels, the vernal pools!
Block Island Sound, Lakes Barkley and Vattern! The
Greenland Sea, the Prut River and the Fish, the Red, the
James, the Drake! The Strait of Otranto, of Malacca, of
Magellan . . .
I put my hand in the shallow bowl of your back and wash the
wrinkles from my finger.
Some nights I imagine myself a sailor wearing my skin and salt
together. This diving suit. I carry a lantern, its flame not of fire
but burning ice.
Contained in your sweat a band of sea nettles and jellyfish the
color of the moon. An octopus waiting in its den, whole
schools of angelfish finning closer!
Sleet hurries its way across the skylight until the glass ends.
Something is out there swallowing ships and I welcome it.
Take every part of me away! I give you these my lungs. My
longest bones, my teeth which I have worn down only with
thinking.
I find your shoulder under the blanket. I lift it up and swim inside.
