To End Along the River

The pain intensifies, maple leaf smoking under a magnifying glass. Turning the couch to face a new direction. Watts Brook sang bearing down on Sam Hill Road, and Sam Hill Road said nothing after the voices in Center Cemetery, that half-assed cacophany that didn't know it was a collective. What is cruel in me, what is lost in me. What is quartz in me. Wind in the far trees, the far hills like enormous black stones laid end to end along the river. In which birth is a beginning only for parents. I write wrapped in an old quilt, coffee gone cold in the mug to my left, nothing in particular save the old devotion to process. At a late juncture one's resistance to order begins to soften, and order appears, as if the world were suddenly a library. Holding my lover's hair back. In the morning distance many crows, the horses stamping their feet against the cold. And what else can a body do but grow up and die? Apple pie, oral sex, Frank O'Hara poems. One last fling in the twilight? Pretense, pretext. Death comes for the mosquito. Oh this sorry heart, this pile of smashed plates. This kitchen in which nobody ever learned how to keep a secret.