For the Late
by
laura hughes
I.
How do you know that the season has come
to ride in the field through the death of the day?
The coffee is dark, the grinds in the dirt,
on the cusp of the mountain you see
the workings of a cool furrow, seeds taking.
II.
I can’t sleep with the closet door open:
I dream of fire or a swallow in the walls.
I wake sweating or not at all.
I wake with plans from yesterday,
somebody else’s lists of names, groceries,
a beetle casually scraping up the floor.
III.
We learned to sit with our arms folded under
the parallel sea across the sand;
you, on a walk for wallets and old hats
your shadow reaching away from the pier
where the heavy salt has set into wood.
In another land we sat in the rushes
the thick, tall grass impossible to pull out.
You told me without hesitating
that you had much more in the hold,
melons and birds brought in from the south,
that you’d learned to make their noises
and return would never come.
IV.
I learned the way your thighs leaned
in the sweaty dust of roads made for loneliness.
You put your watch away three years ago:
you couldn’t sleep, time was too oppressive.
We have waltzed near graveyards, tasted
each others’ nightmares, rode the candles
burning until two. I wouldn’t sleep
until you gave me no more reasons.
V.
In the death of the day our tongues turned blue.
We rode into fields, the mild southern cold.
I learned to peel an orange in one wrist-flick,
to hold off winter with a worried feeling,
nearly escaping, holding on with words to make
the world slow. You kept moving,
you kept watch on my roof in thick nights,
clothed in steam coming off the mountain.
You kept singing while the moon set,
turning your wrists into the instance
of where warm meets cold.