Your blood is a ride home.
I am polite for it.
back to Georgia, where peaches beat back
the dark like an apron at flames.
was it in the water? the sun?
Your two breasts like
the sound of oars without moonlight.
It is everywhere now, in our jets, our Tupperware,
our road trips, the doubt
in our plumbing at Christmastime—
The specter in the movie that if you rewind
and play back slowly you can spot
in the corner, inconspicuous
as a stood broom.
you and the barbed wire wary blood
as angles taken in by a finch.
You become mean with new glands,
and then i find you under your hair
like the woe of a handpump,
lessons at wells.
You are the second one i knew
before you are even old enough
for someone to be desperate along with you
to lie in your bed, both
in awe at such a near,
modern death, touching its phases, micro-gore.
A death at the mall, the retreat, the beach,
blood in the sand, the spot
lightning struck and turned
to a glass wand.
You identify with sanguine quotas, routines.
you become interested in
returning to old campuses.
This is what i've always dreamed of,
and you're living it,
tufting away like the heart of a watch.
You take yourself home,
to villas, waterfronts, straits along which
others have drowned, too, and with much more
to shake off besides—
to georgia, with the world's busiest airport
and peaches that burn the air
like a casting out.
