pornografia

everything is in the words

like twisting the night into spools of time. sometimes I am still like the made bed, waiting for the weight of arms and legs and backs, and at others I am the dinner tray, wine and clams and reluctant poinsettias, set for dining. but all the while the television set threatens to burst into life. 

and headlights pull into the parking lot at the hotel, throwing up latitudes of light that catch the shifting curtains and pin our shadows against the peeling wallpaper. for that instant, the outside — dishwater and bank holidays — is let in, till the engine dies and we are lampblack once again.

to think that rain can be alive in a square,
framed by the room’s window; this variation of a theme can become anything — a rip of thunder and stocking, better still, a Norse god in nylon pantyhose, or setting out of here in thin paper boats to the waterfront a hundred feet away  

where the wind, thick with salt, presses into the mast, breathing it on across the rough breadth, and the waves lash against the hull — collapsing it inward — the agony of a reprieve. when morning steals upon the grainy night, the storm breaks. the windows fly open, and the rain is finally set free.