Your old photos come like bee stings,
each one disablingly magenta, dead-ripe plums
suggesting your jaw line from another time,
but still a blur at 1200 dpi.
You weren't always mine.
Yet I invented you, like the others. My imagination,
spinning like a car wheel after a flip on the icy interstate,
cannot be stopped.
Like Joan Crawford relaxing between takes,
I'm busy knitting sweaters from lovers' lives, odds and ends,
midnight stories carried on your breath, or daytime facts
handed out begrudgingly: We wanted different things
is all I know of your divorce.
I embroider it.
Those old tales of your deceptions,
the linen choreography of your surrenders,
hit my brain like nicotine:
I get junked up on you. Your eyes
are always thinking about something else—
while your mouth won't stop propositioning me.
Behind three or four pairs of eyelids old dramas live,
escaping my stenography—the football player
who broke Alice's heart, Jose's German girlfriend,
Bob loose in Provincetown—an ocean heard
remotely through a conch shell. The passionate
bard of my own obsessions, sometimes I wonder
how my subjects fared, after my blood ran clean of them.
Is anyone observing their legs and lips
with my archivist's nerves? Who follows them
in furtive glances now?
More to the point: Was it love's warm regard
that poisoned me?
Or its sweet-sweet fury
elsewhere.
*Vaguely inspired by "You Sent Me Flying" (Amy Winehouse)
