She looks down from her second floor
over the iron scrollwork of a balustrade
to the bed where an exhausted lover lies.
She watches his body in sleep
like a soothsayer, like her often-jailed grandma
would scry horse names in the Daily Racing Form.
The body of the muscled young man
ripples dazzling in sleep, but he reaches
into her absence violently. It’s war.
He has the twists of a bullfighter
and makes stabbing motions.
She thinks of her future and sees red,
a game where he waves an illusion
right in her face, slays her before many others.
Later, it’s Chris. Her body whispers out of bed
and floats upstairs to spy on his unconscious
form in the underworld of sleep. She sees
he stretches in yogic forms, otherworldly asanas.
He becomes a lotus, a crane, he bows
to nights too deep for any human presence.
She feels him fly out a window like a slip of paper
in the wind. She lets him go, drinks a glass of milk.
But Reza! What sweetness of death when she leaves
his freshly-journeyed body there. Milked by what dreams,
does he panic and become an unborn child
on the mattress where they have just made love?
He seems to blindly see her sharing the bed still,
he caresses the form of her absence. His hands
trace the void she left him. She has become
the Braille of absence. He whimpers himself awake,
and in that moment turns correctly and exactly
to the space above where she stares. His eyes
flash open and know where she is. He will
always be this way, she knows in a heat flash
of, weirdly, almost anger. She feels herself being pinned
like a butterfly. This one, this one, this one, this one…