If they’d told me to recapture

     the rhododendron glaze narrowly,

or to chaperone the night’s

    answer, I would have,

I could have, easily. But how to lure myself away

from my own body—that I didn’t know.

    Afternoon stroked

me (the hedonist), then there was a blur

like persuasive wisteria. Where

was the accident to get me out? Body after

    body—oversexed for nothing but a scrim,

a stir. I stretched into the instructions, the foreign

words (they licked my skin), stretched past

    their thresholds,

stretched further into their vestibules. Lucky grammar.

Honestly, I lived inside a ghost country,

    caught up in a candied lunacy.

      Power haloes.

Caught like a cluster of bells.

    Hear them?

Hear them winging it, making up

    a step for absence amiss?

      We were a figure for someone’s

apology or scandal, uncollected gifts, frays

to pray by, necks forming

    an erotic choir. Two of us

shared a smoke, looked for a moment

to take a roadtrip, a deep-set scenario. (She talked

against the blue mock-shade

    of the dressing room with its fabrics

and stretch of mesh). One

of many shes trying to find the right music

    for her vintage jacket brooch.

      Another stood in front of me, her hair

Like waxy fruit. We were nudes in a row

    speckled with seed pearls. What flourishing

we thought we’d mastered, but I wanted anything

to replace gray elastic, the branches fluid

    and poised at the window,

anything to lie in wait for me.