And here in the thicket of us, she’s scouring
pots with the same hair cloth I used to wrap

around my torso. And here I am sifting through
the different brands of truth and reconciliation

rummaged from beneath the floor boards. In the middle
of the night, the radiator and the pipe that follows

from it sometimes bang with urgency, sometimes hiss
with a secret and selfish knowledge, and in a daze

you could believe another world is trying to make
itself known, blowing off its steam. The fact is

that the facts of the world are the same
for the happy and unhappy man alike: sometimes

we are cold, other times warm. Sometimes a dark
and stormy, a cigarette out the window, or a silence

meaning one or none of these: today and today only,
the sunset is no metaphor; I could go for a glass of water;

something is indeed on fire. Those nights in night school
the professor lectured on theories abstract

as the Titanic sinking, and I wondered how
I would take part in a world which measures success

in terms of minimizing loss (meaning, protect
the principal). As he went on and on about sunk costs

I thought of her and the sheer mountain of nail polish
bottles she hoards in the corner, stronghold

of HERE I AM. I don’t believe that there’s no place
for ambergris in the budget. Starlight, I found you tucked

in my back pocket looking like an emissary
or envoy, but whatever your message was

(if you had one): not received. I can only assume
therefore that your mission is to return

to the source. To tell them how we place want
before need, the deftitude with which we operate

the remote, and the sense of allegiance we give
to the plasma screen. Will you describe to them

our concept of public bathrooms, the irony
of hiding in a stall, the principles of urinal distribution

among men? Brief them, too, on the finer points.
How what holds is watching a movie together in bed

or spending enough time with another such that life
apart is counterproductive. How it is running the water

for an extra ten seconds or so to get the lead out.