We are laid up
in a hotel room,

central Europe,

some time in winter
so the nights
are a treasure trove

of fresh falls

plazas for us to claim as our own, virgin snow
for us to defile (you laugh at this from bed,
smoking skinny Czech cigarettes that remind
me of you, diaphanous behind the shower
curtain, all solid figure, no detail,

like a tree before dawn.

The days are pale,
sometimes clear,
and we watch their deliberate cadenzas
from our window

the people bundled and bustling. “There
is so much art we could be seeing,” I
say from bed. You are curled in the finely

tailored arm chair, which you have
dragged to the windowsill, leaving a long
scuff on the hardwood floors, which you
think are cherry and I insist are pine.
(“it is the smell, dear,

like the northwoods
of my childhood.

The imaginary smell of the imaginary wood“)

You are shirtless and luminous, your
toes tapping the cold, frosted glass,

tapered profile
anxious percussion
aquiline girl

(I try to picture your breasts but cannot
picture them, for the raw veracity of
desire, its physicality, betrays poetry,
though I have very vivid lines of your
shoulder blades and collar bones: very rigid,
turned inward, concave to your heart)

There is a harpsichord, across from the
window, strictly decorative. But since
I am making this all up, you are playing it,
wearing a gown the color of amethyst.

This, too, strictly decoration. And

the chandelier,
your tapping toes,
everything you whisper while I am half sleeping,
the melon and berries sent for breakfast,
the cream like moonlight,
every last look I lavish on you
while you study the city with your studious, cautious eyes.

All of it simple ornamentation. “Do you think
that love can be choreographed, plotted
out like an interpretative dance?” I don’t
know, kid, can you get out of your head and fuck

me?

Your body is out of place here,

so aestival,

florid, a lake flush with sun,

your smell redolent of a hay field
when the wind is still. Be still,

you say from bed.
Don’t breathe.
Can you hear the snow?
I have always loved that sound.

Nothing, there’s
nothing.
A void of sound,
as if the world
has disappeared.

I imagined this a lot as a girl,
being coated in white, silent,
I imagine you saying.
You are not afraid of dying.
I think it must be
how your fingers unfurl
like pink rhododendrons,

and your corpuscles are like coral.

Do you remember that book of poetry you
lent me some years ago? Yes, it was just
last year. But not here, you say, bringing
your body into mine and cradling my cranium
so my face is in your belly. It is much later
here. You are balding in such an endearing

way, so sweetly fallible. You stand and I can
imagine the insouciance of your gait, childish
still, flirting with the sea of your blossoming powers.

You forgot scraps of paper in that book, little
things you had scribbled down. I couldn’t
read your handwriting. But I think that is the
only time I ever loved you, to see how messily
you were spread over the page.

The concrete, the tangible,
some physical act
that is not made of our materials,
or time.

You loved me when I gave you that book and
no longer so when you returned it,
though you would smile like you did,
better for my heart, which you would like to
protect. Because my heart is your youth,
its little alcove where it can hide and you
can visit at times. Like this hotel room,

its fragrant cigarettes, your fingers on the
harpsichord. Of course, this is my heart,
too, everything has become my heart:
the smoke, the music, your nose pressed
to the glass and waiting for the sound of

settling descent.

None of it real, and yet, here,
the physical evidence of its passage.

You should fall in love with real women, kid.

I’m not real, not anymore. What I am trying
to tell you is that your life is artifice.
Except, at times, your writing.But only
those fervent poems, the desperate ones
you write in the middle of the night.
Most of the time, you’re too concerned with
style and technique. You are afraid to abandon
structure, ashamed of being splayed open.

~~~

The terror is the fragility in your body; in
the sapid melons and the sanguine pool you
have left by the harpsichord, shedding the
melting granules of snow layer by layer; and
even in the city outside, veiled behind an
imaginary curtain of white, ethereal globes of
street lamps the small sentinels of humanity
carving the gloaming. There is a preciousness
in all this which memory lacks. The shame -

as you light another skinny Czech cigarette,
your vernal form - is desire’s transience,
memory’s imprecision, all of our hearts
rendered mute by the world’s slow, beautiful
dying. The imperfect rhythm of your breath,

the silence of snow.