Waking before dawn at a motel in a strange city
from a dream in which I am exploring its dark
streets, I see the wet umbrella in the bathtub,
remember arriving soaked and clammy from
a drought-ending day's  worth of cold rain,
wrapping myself in the bedclothes, drinking wine.
What comes back then are those nights years ago,
in the months after I'd left my husband, when
each day I allowed myself one scotch at bedtime,
as if by a prescription written to let me lie down
alone and sleep, my measure of loneliness answered
by that measure of oblivion, taken neat. A pure ritual:
one drink only, never more, taken without fail.
I was my own physician, patient and understanding:
I knew I'd been broken and needed to heal. Each
night's sleep was anodyne I steeped in - or was it
a placebo keeping my disease at bay? Older, sadder,
happier, I could not treat myself with such decisive
will, the rigid discipline of youth, unbending,
dogmatic. I binge, starve, sleep or wake as terror
and the craving for oblivion wax and wane like tides,
extreme as summer's months of drought, last night's
flooding antidote. Loss, anguish, fear of dying
alone, of living alone: all recur; no cure, no cure.
 

Intimation

Nothing's here but sleep, desire, fog
and snow, a landscape of white becoming
gray, gray becoming white. No geese,
no heralds over the creek or hills to tell us
this hour is sacred, ordained by necessity's
chambered heart. And yet, and yet... silence
is absence, absence the intimation of presence.
I am included here. If my dreams spoke,
they would be misunderstood; their language
is so difficult to speak without weeping, and
the tears of things glut the throat. The present
interrogates the past, or is it the past which
forces itself into the present, demanding
its meaning in the now? Someone gives me
a pair of hands, a bone, a seed. Bury what's dead,
bury what will be living. Time's the detective
who sorts, seeks, lists the suspects. Loose,
unhinged, I swing like a door on one screw.
What's sprung me? Don't tether my movements,
my pulse. Loose me, shake me, let me come
loose. The weight of this winter is causing roofs
to collapse, whole buildings to shudder and
fall, slip into rain like an icicle with one shiver.
Why did I think I would go unscathed?
Something in me will buckle, give way, sigh
once under the cold terror of a thick crust
of days and let go. Only the small bones over
my insteps hold me to my soles. The body
is black with longing. Give me my hours,
my long days and nights laid out like paths
in the snow. Give me the kiss on the forehead,
lips meeting a familiar texture of skin, tasting
the forgotten salts of affliction. This ceremony
will be enough. It will be used, consumed,
renewed, made bread and consumed again, like
the earth, like everything around us, like us.