Migraine
The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.
He is the more intelligent by far.
Facing each other rather desperately--
his eye is like a star--
we stare and say, “Well, we have come this far.”
Elizabeth Bishop
Cirque d’Hiver
Hot and rough in the back of my head
the spot glows like a cooling coal, slow
in growing old. It sloughs itself off, a
lobster exposed, the rigid case
it spent months staging, months in-
sisting an intimacy with, split, broke
open, a hole now alone now as an ocean
goes over it like a brothel of johns, it
is plunged into and upended, it is
twisted and carried by nausea by
wet wind by lips and skin and stitches
or (today) cod all the way across an atlantic of
mountains and dropped like nothing,
like a worm in the fold of flesh we’ll
never know until we open it, until, cut
from the bone (also thrown) (don’t
worry, another’s grown) curls in a blind
it has been all along and rears up
the way wind makes, if I’m facing it,
the sheets do before the rain, still
an hour or two away, but coming, God
help us, coming.
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