falling off: another fidelity

falling off: another fidelity

I think it does arrive finally

though maybe with a white hide

of dried sweat and tired

from the long ride.

Don’t tell me you don’t know

who or what even though all

your  while your shoulders are south

of you and even leaning not east

Jesus you started east, no we see

don’t we (the we being the fingers

we have left to dip into the pink

throats, bellows, no, true

and this haul of the coming in

breath is how it’s all squeezed

all we seek into one fucked up

moment yes after all these

years framing houses we never

will in every feathered cliché never

will live in.  Brand new

and sawdust and walls and rocks

strewn for the only reason of clutching

them up to the chest and walking

them down to the rip-rap and all

the water coming on fast

then pulling back at the pajamas

the dead were told to wear

if they ever found their way here

in the dark with their whole clean

life bound up like sacrifice

and twitching  pigeon twitches I mean

she’s gone all this time clean

as cooked and cheese-cloth sieved

peace, she’s her whole life a belief

sweet as that baby tooth of an adductor

 muscle you know the one that opens

the bivalve and exposes that one 

testicle of a belly and the plan

before today was never take it, ever,

in the palm of her hand never take

it up and pull back the cuff

stuck to the neck never let it

be anything but bulge ugly so what

is it that changes what does she

have to, after those bellows

open, think about to begin

closing down to ease her whole self

on to it and begin rising but not

until she’s up to the hilt

not until she feels her hips

what is he said once, before

he died, parenthesis, yes, that’s it

parenthesis, her pelvis a pair

 of wings and she wonders

what’s made first: the backbone of a vow

 going straight

through or the blot of salt caught

on the tip, and the going one way

the world has to lean for it to be

the blood or the other, to calcium

and what when the house

comes down around her Achilles

will she give up to repent

it all.  What after all this time

it’s taken to come calling, arrives?