PAS DE DEUX

James Kerns

I.

I like to lie awake at night and watch the breath that leaves your mouth
Sew little dimples across the fabric of the sheets.
That evidence of you so near to me
Fills me with even more longing
Than the weight of your body resting on my arm.
I am enlarged by the trust which allows me such intimacy,
And I breathe carefully-fearful of breaking the spell.

I picture our home, with rows of books lining the walls
Which tell our separate stories and odd bits of furniture we make comfortable:
Worn loveseats and scuffed table-tops, my lamp with the misshapen shade
And your exquisite ceramic parrot.
But what I really love is the balance your presence gives to the rooms,
The heightened sense of music in the walls and the salty, carnival taste of the air.

While your eyes are dancing beneath their lids, I dream of rainy Sundays,
Of infinite jazz notes and long afternoons of lovemaking
When I will awaken to find you watching me from the softness of our bed
And you feel no need to cover your body, or brush the scent out of your hair.

I swear these things to myself in the darkness,
Because I know that there are pieces of you
I have dreamed of having-but cannot.
Like the breath leaving your sleeping mouth
Which I guard with my silence.

II. I Never Said That

When I brought you flowers in the rain you called me silly, but I knew better.
You thought it was funny when I compared your fingers to the languid petals,
But what I really meant was that the slender blossoms reminded me of your delicacy.
When we made love, I wanted the heat that was trapped between our bodies to last forever,
I wanted to melt into the silent fold of your curling fingers. You told me I was too heavy.

One fall day, walking through the wind with your warm hand in mine,
I listened to you tell me about the price of love and I did not answer.
Instead, I showed you the way the trees bent against the force of the day
And how low the sun set in the sky, ringing the horizon with bands of pink and gold.
You were quiet most of that evening but your eyes were hard as glass beads
And I did not sleep well that night, afraid love might slip away in the dark.

When the days grew shorter we spent more time looking across tables at each other
And you demanded to know what was important to me. I told you about the old woman
Who sang to herself because she had no one else who would listen and you stared
At me from the darkened windowpane, your moist eyes soft in the reflection of the glass.

You left me in the winter because I did not love you, though for weeks I had nothing except my sadness. I never said that I didn't love you.
You weren't listening when I told you how the wind tasted on your lips,
Or that I waited every night for the sun to set in the pools of your hair.

III. The Faded Hour of Neon

I took yesterday past midnight, along poorly lit avenues and empty boulevards,
Trying to outrun the shadow of you. I shivered alone in the half-dark
While line order cooks at all night diners stacked bacon for the morning show,
And slow-moving cars prowled the dirty curbs like great, steel scavengers-
Then I pushed my hands deep into my pockets and thought of things left undone.
Of water dripping in rusty streaks and garbage heaped at the sewer's mouth,
Of the perpetual twilight in the heart of the city and the specter of want
Bleeding from curtained windows in shifting blue bands.
I sense the vague promise of dawn suspended in the seconds between yellow and red.
But the aftertaste is bitter and oily, like white sponge-cake left to cool on creosote racks.
And I have seen the legacies of former dawns, trapped in the pitted tar of the streets in a
Jigsaw of cropped glass and piss-stained concrete. I know the powerful odor of despair
That charges like a fist through my bowels; I know the rhythm of failure that beats
Down my temples like pebbles cast from the eyes of figures crowding the hissing vents.

We are all estranged companions in this pre-dawn dark,
We all wanted more from our crumpled brown bags and the laughter
That leapt so gaudily out of doorways of light. But the evening's lacquer has faded
And people of destination have returned to their homes and lovers while
I staked my turf with other paper soldiers (wounded men too weak to lick
The bitterness from their own skin) who make these hours a time of scalded pleading.
I have taken my place in the toothless vanguard, reeling from the liquor and the baited calls,
And the lies I told myself about you, and this spectrum of human misery gives me solace,
So that I am able to laugh, through the bile, into my own sotted sleeve-
Imagining that I have chosen these bloodless hours after neon.
But in-between the moments of light and confusion, my memory works to fill the emptiness.
And slow, smoky echoes of the familiar stab at the tip of my tongue
Like the perfumed fingers of a veiled dancer - But you are not there.
You are not there.