How we loved our paradise of silks and breezes,
noisy water in the distance, comestibles nearby,
libations, sleeping in whatever god’s pajamas and
sneezing their incensey perfume, how we pawed
through things and went without shoes, you tied my
hair in a knot and tried to throw me off the roof, oh
how we laughed, we were so good at laughing, we
were so not good at everything else except perhaps
sleeping, and sex, oh we rode those magic carpets
bomblets whistling down to left and right and in the
hazy distance a sheathy zeppelin gliding whale-like
through air you could breathe up there if you were up
there but we were down here and the long holiday
was becoming a not holiday, a kind of anti-fetish, oh
everything was just so nonetheless, the sky the color
of a stone, you polished my shoes for me and sent
me off to look for work, oh how I looked for work and
trudged from till to till how distant our paradise then
as I ironed my iron-worn skirt, when nothing I did
was good enough and there wasn’t even any sex, I
started forgetting about that somehow, to my
consternation, I recall, oh we weren’t laughing then
or even speaking and all the doors that would be
slammed had been slammed and there were no more
words, the look I caught on my face passing a mirror
was like death like something had slammed into my
head and lodged there and I’d have to wobble about
wincing like that with it forever, like some alien thing
had crawled up inside my life to brood—out out out
I’d say but everything was rushing in, rushing into all
the troughs and hollows flooding corridors and
floating the lamps and how I longed then how we
longed separately for our easy long ago days when
we didn’t sleep on ice and didn’t faint not very often
or just fall out with grief all the lost people and all the
lost things and weariness oh the weariness what a
weary weariness it was, so so weary, we wore muu-
muus and overalls and accidentally took our daytime
meds one night oh what a night that was–pacing
waiting sleep never coming then the day arrived like
coming down from lsd without having had any of the
fun that was so like things then, everything was
aftermath without having any of the before until we
forgot about before and there in our forgetting a new
world erupted in the midst of things, one in which we
were suddenly gallant and vaguely tipsy with
all that forgetting but not really caring much at all
after all falling in our boney way into our cushy scroll
the shreds of all our thoughts like bedding in some
short creature’s cage oh how all hinges were loose
then how we rolled this way and that looking for the
thing inside that was like a counterweight,something
anything to outweigh suffering or trick it into
shuffling off bye now and don’t come back but we’d
forget that too from minute to minute we were good
then at forgetting forgot our keys forgot to put on
our outdoor shoes forgot how we had once hated
each other and ourselves forgot in fact all the years
intervening between about 25 and then whenever
then was, forgot, forgot, forgot,and there we were—
the people we would always be, every moment like
bobbing up for air in the ocean on some bright blue
day with its frightening horizon where all time stops
but still not like the last day on earth though maybe
a bit like the last but one, suddenly this
spaciousness in which nothing much was expected to
happen, so anything could.