Lying In

Lying In

Scars have the strange power to remind us

that our past is real.  The events that caused

them can never be forgotten.

                                                                All the Pretty Horses

                                                                Cormac McCarthy

Afterwards, we take our rest anyway we can

get it: exhausted as nostalgia and grit mixed

in a highball glass, swallowed with false

wit and bravery, believing it all like no one’s

business, staking the claim and rubbing

ourselves off like beads at benediction

our lips and tongue rote thick, our drifting

to wind up at another station different

than our favorite saddest one to know it all

moved on without us.  We shouldn’t sleep

during devotions.  I think how much different

it is to stand in the dim window light

of the bedroom night after night, to listen

to the wind blow the thick and winter-ripped

plastic against the window frame, the solid

crinkle the only thing against the long broke

storm windows, and the sound, it’s like

a sleeping bag I’d’ve had once  and kept

because it reminded me someone took me

seriously when we slept together in it

the inside lined with flannel the outside

a loud polyester something or other

I’ll have to look up the name of but always

think of racecar drivers or windbreakers

a sailor might wear all billowing out in

the wind, arms straight out the boom.  It’s been

years now but I found that sleeping bag

in the basement and if it had been

metal it would never have opened, and as it was

the zipper was corroded, somewhere down 

the line it was missing teeth and the seams, oh

but couldn’t they just say it all with the strain

of coming loose: he’d crawled in one night

while somewhere else in the world a girl

unhooked her bra for herself and let it fall

to the floor of an old bedroom and it was

only her not even a moon and the house shook

and in the cellar some small animal

nosed the bait-plate and moved on

without taking it and got the hell out before, as it

would happen sooner than you know could

imagine, the whole house went up in flames, the room,

the sleeping bag,  coming up for air only

when nostalgia, a naked man, crawls out

but not before kissing her, no, not before that.