“Reverence”
Voiceworks — 2010
In the end, the night tore as quietly
as tissue paper. I held up the morning
like an envelope to the light, a sleuth.
The reveal was you: the reef-knot
of pantyhose in the squall of bedsheets,
the coal dust of mascara. You stumbled,
a demi-god with limits: shivering and finite.
Yet here you landed. I took your temperature –
a secular precaution. In the breach
of possibility from which you appeared,
to understand myself as your lover required
some other virtue. Groping for knowledge,
the upshot was faithlessness: wonder lost
to wisdom: the weight of an egg before it cracks.