Thank god for the bob and the dip.

The years, the years you spend with them, with their hair and their furniture,
with their earrings and their chipped dishes, their tattered photos and dog-eared books,
Rumi andRimbaud and Faulkner and Atwood and Jean Auel and Stephen King,
with the books they couldn’t throw away from the classes they finished and almost finished,
with the Monday underwear, the worm-holed lace and polyester, the sieve-ed cotton,
with the broken elastic, the worms of square rubber, and the stains too obvious to mention,
with the blankets their grandmothers made for them,
with the sour plum stones of decisions digested before you existed.

You live with these things and they mark you. This is normal? To love some stranger, someone you’ve never met until you’ve met her? This person, this person who has opened your mail, tossed your socks in the dryer, this person who has cried for you, for you, she is not even related to you. Sometimes, sometimes, you turn around and she’s dead.

What are you supposed to do with that?

Sometimes it will happen before anything happens,
before you are granted the right to bear a title,
before you are qualified to be widowed. Sometimes she will go,
in the day, in the night, in a car, an ambulance, a bed pan,
in a hospital bed, bed pan, but she’s gone.
Sometimes she will go down the drain in strawberry swirlies,
down the drain of a hotel bathroom in Mexico.

Sometimes, silly, she will have survived that and
you’ll not only know about it, you’ll be dumb enough to think it won’t happen again, but,
Sometimes it will.

Sometimes, on a Friday morning,
the week you broke up,
that week you finally had to go
—see, that happens, and it should be some kind of ok—
but it’s not ok, not ok,
not ok. She, will sometimes check into a hotel
in a picturesque river town—not quite Mexico, a nice enough town this one, but too Republican—
sometimes it will happen that on the way to this hotel along the interstate,
there will be a Fleet Farm, and at this Fleet Farm they will,
Sometimes, sell her not only a rifle, but ammuniton.
Sometimes,

She might drive back to your town and kill you,
if
only
for
breaking
her heart.

But this time she didn’t.

Sometimes, she’ll continue on to that charming, minor resort--really minor--resort town hotel and she’ll get a room. There, she’ll finish what she started in Mexico. A rifle this time instead of bloody vomit. No hospital, no recovery, no shrinks, no meeting you, not-this-time. And I really do have a problem with time.

Sometimes it’s all about the hips. There are hips and there is a beat and there is the heart of the world, what can you say, but-help-oh-Jesus-fuck. Thank god for the line of her, cutting through the day, keeping you above the tide line. Those hips and thank god for her, the thighs and the slim rondure, the arc and the sway, the precious cresting of god’s imagination that is, sometimes, a woman, ringing the bell, the bell of denim and taut chevrons, the bell and the spool of dreaming, the line of mysterious, tricky thought from navel to ankle and back to chin again, the line of cool cheeking left behind, if only in the mind’s eye. What does that skin smell like? What does that skin taste like? What is that, that kite of one life cracking in the ions before you? A butterfly mated to a rabbit, the grace and the softness and the airy pure, lemony-sex as she floats by, ringing that damn bell. How could you not love that? How could you not want that, the skin of dancing shadows?