Listen:
This is the sound of drunkenness held
on the last twilit gunshot. The sound
of your voice carrying from the flat lawn
and up past the sleeping baby, past
the boys whose ears have tuned
to this semblance of fury.
Tonight, Texas folds itself down
into the hollow of your throat and nestles there
its whisky, its raw, hot breath baited
toward the edge of our union.
This is the sound of my standing
at a road’s crossing. This is the sound
of a car tire wailing over and beyond
a tornado’s berth.
See me point two fingers in every direction.
To the south of us, a mirrored bottle’s emptied
mouth. The north,
an eagle of wanting. I wonder
who gave me this urgency. Who told me
to pick through your heart, as if your heart
was a sieve for my choosing. Where to go east
is to be singular and afraid of my uncoupled side,
and where to go west is to turn myself inward
to the fierceness of you, your eye’s
cold spurn. Is to sit with my aunts
at a table made from a cask’s aged jaw and watch
their husbands spit arrows
into an echo’s turbulence. I know
I would never cast myself into a pool of tongues, yet
I am facing you or the creature of you
built up in its fever and I am both fear
and reflection, I am the sound
of your freeness bathing in your southern
country,
standing on the brink of a desire. I am
shying away from the sting of a bitter turn,
the dark of our difference circling us in caustic balance,
in a ruinous noise.
