He:
The trapdoors close on missing women
of whom everyone has heard at one time or another,
one way or another in the least of circumstances,
while an arrival of tools and machines
flecks the day’s scattered blood here and there
and the hour comes between a barber lounging
and a man sewing an awning.

Beside you a throat is torn out
subtly as eel’s sting,
the criminal boy head wilts like poisoned metal,

and like the circle in all my paintings

you frighten me away as though
stumbling over me
your heart compacted the harm there
and went on beating.

She:
I don’t believe you.
Your lies are a mattress soft as marl
and the wind eyes you away from lips
she manufactured for your joy
convinced you were in love with men
when the ice-cream boy smoothed your shirt

while you sucked up the books
that were on you like coyotes.

I see your skin across bellies in
bubbling kiosks and a Ferris wheel
twirling at night true
as an orange slice to that wish of yours.

And what could be more easy,
more cavernous and everyday I wonder.

I love you,
the disturbed water rainbows to please you,
but no of course you’re elsewhere and
my visions as always gutter.
The husband in you is hopeless too.

Until the I’ll sleep and work with pretty men,
find houses filled with
common women and myself the tyranny
that squeezes blood from a nasturtium.

August 1976