"Last Night."
"The next day, I am almost afraid.
Love?
It was more like the dragonflies in the sun,
100 degrees at noon, the ends of their abdomen stuck together.
I close my eyes when I remember, I wince, I cover my mouth.
Love-- I hardly know myself, like something twisting
and twisting out of a chrysalis, enormous being
without language, all head, all shut eyes,
and the humming more like ruin, madness,
the way they writhe away, away, and do not leave back, back,
away, back.
Did I know you?
No kiss, no sweetness-- it was more like killing,
death-grip holding to life, the sexes like two violent hands
clasped tight, barely moving, more like closed
in the lion's jaws and eaten.
And the screaming, I groan to remember it.
And then when we started to die and die,
then I refuse to remember, the way a drunk
forgets what he smashed, lay ruined behind us.
Afterwards, you held my hands extremely hard
as I shuddered in steady, long shudders like the ferryboat
when the axle won't engage.
You kept me sealed exactly against you,
our hairlines wet as the arc of a doorway.
You clamped in your arms like a sweet straitjacket
till I slept--
that was love.
And we woke in the morning clasped, fragrant, buoyant,
that was the morning after love.
Are you all right?
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
Five more.