A Brief Symphony of Candied Light

I closed my eyes and told him to come back to bed.
The room was stale with skin smell and half-burnt smokes.
I called out again and again. His name against the tip
of my name and running all the way down
to a rounded shaft, a hard “s” or a coarse,
rugged “u”. I closed my eyes and counted ten.

The long gray light came falling, little bits
of cotton fiber and particles of skin
suspended, sudden and ordinary,
then falling again. Slow things down.
Make it count. When he comes back in the room
tell him you love him. That his job will get better.
Say your classes are going well. That you love
the hair on his arms brushing against yours.
That his skin, soft, tight, lacquered over
in pine-sweet refrains, feels great.

Say you love him. That he is ocean
and pine tree and sawdust
and streetlight. That he makes you ooze love,
that he makes you lose love.

I closed my eyes and imagined rain in September.
The light was tender and closed around me
in a sound that I had learned to gain.

The room smelled of old hands, and worn sheets,
and a cold rain, and a torn street,
and a sense of loss without loss, as if
all the limits of our lives played out in lines
beyond a barred window of broken night

in a brief symphony of candied light.