Rub your spine against me
To scrape off the old skin.
Press a thumb to the underside of the
Square corner of my jaw.
Remind me what life is
And where the throbbing stars lie in the heavens.
Each vertebra you grind into my knuckles
Is a wish for later years.
A whistle in the darkness
Can summon the spirits,
But I am dried up
Already, as I watch your shoulder blades in the kitchen
And try to summon tears.
What will become of me
In the empty winters ahead,
Never as icy as before the calamities
But never, either,
As painless.
I will ache here and there,
Red starbursts behind eyelids
And jumping from elbow to ankle,
Stretching myself naked along the leather of the sofa
And collapsing
In avalanche after avalanche,
Pondering tectonics into this whiskey,
And pontificating hollowly
Upon the Northern Lights I saw once
In a memory
Of a summer night.