of statues, ii

you are everest, pulled into a boxCrammed
down flung
Shot skimming across a runway. shutters
attached to necks and
cold, cold, lights you wear
Lightskin, sharkskin, your
skin,
a watery grave of arched necks and lips

The danger is, not to let them scare you.

i am small, a droplet in an air-conditioned room a droplet
that has no place, a droplet that
cannot go home. the gucci suits
in front of me are tinkling about
the sex maniac in the corner and the rich dame
is a walking fifty-million shell. the music
is shrill enough to—

And you, touched by the hands of women
i do not know, your body
paraded, a head on a stick across the palais-royal and
the glorious abandonment with a side dish of
Easy Cash. an acquaintance tells me, you have no right
it’s just a job, it means nothing that they trace the marks
my lips made long ago, the marks i swore
would shelter him

who is daddy kissing in this picture, your daughter asks. and why—
it's late, darling i reply. her hair, the fragile ghost of poppies, and the window that asks
of you.

there are husbands who are lonely, too.

the ballet of the traffic as you find me
inhaling—the air
swoops by on a pendulum. the foreign, new histories
cliff-edge on time that we have discovered can go
backwards and
upwards and downwards and
inwards—browsing all the books you've never written
loving a family of birds during war
realizing the genius is hidden behind the dark green suspenders.
experience measures only a little—the rest
laughs at us beyond our
cages of logic, cages
you said would give us cage-rash so we
fled.