Sonnet
We wake. Sing a little song
of panic breakfast. Then check
the weather. Clear the throat and
wait for the latch of rasp or
rattle. Scan the Tuesday street,
naked of children. (A stray
woman, leashed to her beagle,
nervous for privacy or
conversation.) If we are not
at home, we might poison
the air. Yet all day, we long
for her salt smell, his clutch.
Dry secret of an ancient despair:
how we grow raw with untouch.
* * * * *
Quarantine
Because I have not forgotten
the ceremony of our nakedness,
my hunger that begs the question —
Because I woke in the early dark,
thinking I was again a child,
duplex wall echoing the neighbors’
snore as some reprise of parents,
parents, heavy in their slumber
sighing out of sync with each
other in an old wooden house
of draft and splinter where
we kept close and eyed one
another in the theater called
family where acts were made
to seem spontaneous, lines
unrehearsed, plot cast by
some fate or garage god,
some latter-day method
director who tied us like
monkeys to a kitchen table
or made the eldest drag,
for days, a pot of ugly soup,
a broken chair. I woke then,
fully — and was forty. Not
a child packed in a tight
cigarette box of white fiery
carcinogens. I wanted to call,
to hear the carnal startle
in your voice, to conjure
your unstudied touch
along my limbs in a warm
bed-meadow not a hundred
odd miles and plague away.