Tuesday

The rain was out in the street
making collages. 

People indoors make collages,
and I don't want to think
first world problems
of time like Proust. Look at their
hands ripping the ages
out of books which stood
for no one has the permission
to steal my pages
when we were kids
and every library had
at least one gorgon.

Let us paste time down
over other time and see.
The mind likes to see things
just ripped out like that,
the strange contours

of a body discovering
how it is a body,

if never quite why.

The collage at night
replaces the dog-eared
lover, a book we were currently
reading, which seems to wonder now
if we would sacrifice it
in this way. For art or some other
abstraction. Just how much
should I trust you, the book
seems to be saying under
its borrowed breath, as we hold it
close, whisper promises
to protect and preserve
what will slowly die
and only be brought back
to partial life by willful destruction.

What we will not tell it:
it is only certain pieces of you
that I will want and those
for the way they will brush
new-torn strangeness.