And this-- I have the misfortune of getting--
of having tension headaches, sometimes
set off by any old thing.
And of course they always strike in the middle
of the night, which is--
or rather the wolf hour of the night, somewhere between 4:00
and 5:00 in the morning when you really don't want to be awake.
So "Headaches."
Wine again.
The downside of any evening's bright exchanges
scribbled with retribution.
Stark awake, a tick throbs in the left temple
site of bombardment.
Tortured syntax, thorned thoughts,
vocabulary like a forest littered
with unexploded cluster bombs.
No exit except explosion ripping the branches.
Stacks of shadowed books on the bedside table, wall a jar
of Tiger Balm.
You grope for its glass netsuke hexagon.
Teak stabs, dull pain supersedes voices.
Skills, obsessive one sided conversations.
Turn from mouths you never will kiss, a neck your fingers
will not trace to a golden shoulder.
Think of your elders.
If, in fact, they died, the interlocutors
who, alive, recede into incoherence,
you would write the elegy, feel clean grief
still asking them questions.
Though you know it's you who'd provide the answers.
Auden's old people's home, Larkin's the old fools,
are what come to mind, not Yeats.
In a not so distant past, someone
poured a glass of wine at 3:00 in the morning, laid a fool's
cap pad on the kitchen table.
Mind a spark from the long loquacious dinner two hours
behind her.
And you got a postcard of '50s jazz club next day across town
where she scrawled, she'd found the tail end of a good Sancerre
in the fridge, and finished her chapter.
Now she barely knows her friends when you visit.
Drill and mallet work on your forehead, bust up,
and it is Margaret you mourn for.
Get up, go to the bathroom.
You take the drugs.
Synapses buzz and click.
You turn the bed lamp on, open a book.
Vaso-constrictor and barbiturate make words
in oval light reverberate.
The sky begins to pale at 6 o'clock.