From Vicinities

by Lisa Lubasch

That desire came consistently and without rain,
the unstifled blew in the door to relieve us, “we were just
that way,” always arriving
neither here nor there,
frightening ourselves. Meanwhile I kept writing
these lyrics that wouldn’t take,
and the blue light grew into
fall. Isn’t this
my ecologue after all?


                           *

                    Reciting our pledges,
asking the waiter to bring us some tea
and a samovar, an early tonic...

We lost all sense of follow-through —
pursuer, pursued — we couldn’t keep up, though we’d be tempted
to try, given the locus of desire we’d uncovered

in our boots. The shoots had already detangled
and dried, the blown azaleas were waiting.
What was stopping us? Could it be

some silly protocol? The gross insistence
that could never be had
enough...


                           *

Then the sound was wrong, wrung out
in starts and bangs —

Something was said at the start
I can’t remember, the marred sense of it
strayed through the door

and fell silent, somewhere in the middle...

What I think it had to do with was
those ghost-like few who led us home
when we should have been going to the dance,

although for now, the turn-round was enjoyable,
revelatory, something akin to our desire for light
inside the rain.


                           *

Spring was approaching, the tired hinge
of visors getting closer
then receding into leaves...

It was a time of

festivals in tents and smallish rites —
and the high bramble you pulled upwards,
and some roughly few vices

in the bayberry bush.


                           *

     No matter.  Those who spent the day in other ways
knew something different from us,
something perhaps a little more abstract

though hardly vocable — the candied kid-light
that suddenly grew...

                      When you
became you no longer,
you were nowhere to be found —

but the fixed idea or motion
of that phantasm still grew beyond the clouds,
something to define us by,

no matter how briefly.


                           *

Displeased with our new habit
of returning,
we made our beds and

felt a sense of

how gruesome the first time you were kissed by it
felt — the clod-heeled myopic sensation
of pain,

                    its wriggled punishment.


                           *

     (and already the night's long fog
unfolding in the most predictable way —
                    but then, there will be time

to throw ourselves into something
dark and faithless, time

to be swallowed up by vicinity — )

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