The hollow

_i.


He says, you can tell an honest man
by the run of his walk, the stalk of his step.
Laugh, then, no, no, it's not for women.
The honest woman is walking towards you
even when she walks away, he says.
Nothing can be as deep as woman
or as hollow. I cannot be woman:
I am a tangle of shallows
destined to fall the willowish
drowning men until they free.
I am the highway the honest men
use and in being used, I gain permanence.
You, you sloppy cadences and twists,
I strangle. God, you got me heady still.
But my cankerous heart pulses on
and spills lethe on grassy steppes.




_ii.


His sister's tone is mechanic
and breathy. She talks the night to drowsy;
satellites fill the sky. The cop who writes
us up is the same cop who once had to wrestle
starry seed-pods from my wrists in the performance
of what Emerson calls beads on a string.

Something in his sister's tone makes me think of
peeling the sunburn off my breasts
in filmy strips and his long eyelashes.




_iii.


The valley belongs to sad runners.
I have but one memory of August:
it's a lock of auburn hair
floating on the surface
of a creek, curling in
on itself and clinking, unlocking.

I can't wait until he scoops
himself up, skin licked
by clay, smeared, then shale.

He covers over me like
he is the first woollen mist
below the clouds.