A Day Has Ended

The wood in this apartment squeaks.
The cat has finally settled in
to the couch.
She’d been recently
preoccupied
with one
particular
section of wall. Staring at it. Pawing it.
I figured there was someone in there
talking to her.

I look out into the flat, smudged face of a tree,
a wall of leaves, I look up
into the Cassandra moon, and the
silly blue
fabric that
man has put over his windows.
We can see his kitchen anyway;
we can see his old hands holding knives.

This book had been rained on many times.
I left it on the balcony
to collect
dirty pools in its pages.
Now they are disfigured
and resemble old faces. I touch their lips.
Upon them, the saliva
dried up, the sheen of dead writers.

The mute
wind.

He does not act in expressive properties, the wind.
Music or autopsy.
And somehow the tree has been convinced by this wind,
and the cat bends into night.

I keep my ankles uncomfortably folded,
try not to disturb her
or the sleeping woman
next to me. I think of the stillness of caves.

I do not want to go to sleep—I don’t care
for the shape of that
mirror’s circle, a grape
in a god’s mouth
as it holds
open,
terribly open.

So I conjure up the old mothers.
They skid about the room in slippers,
they take
baths
in our bathtub, they forget to cover
their breasts as they drink milk
from children’s cups.

And the leaves, I think, are like doctors
who have put an IV in me,
administering an anesthesia, and are waiting for it
to take effect,
studying me as I go to sleep.

Then she emits a small sound in her sleep.
A little comma in some dream,
a half
owl hoot, the fragment
of a scream.

And it pushes me
into it. Not
at all
ready.