IT’S LIKE THAT

People in love only talk themselves you say

and abandon a sock and a shoe overnight in a pot, dreaming

I’m snow and you’re wind

whipped pine needles scratching the bark and pitch

and wake to the red-winged, one-eyed shadow

over your spine that dips into the rise

of your lower back. I throw the bone

shaped alarm clock to the dog and slide

into the phosphorescent

undertow, arched and squeezing the embalmed

years of sensibility out of my agitated

screaming out of the ceiling, like divorce

on a ferris wheel and suffocate it

slowly into the sheets. Or take the impossible

blue of a dragonfly, quick and dodging

its reflection on a lack after the fog

has given in to the pale

moon of morning and throw that

into the logic of the sock and the shoe

and you’ll understand why I love you.

It’s like that.

~Roger Weingarten

From Poetry magazine, March 1986