JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

Who understood her?
I graft snippets of her wanderings on to my page,
so many faces, all the same, all nothing.
’I touch you and you’re gone’, she said
unbuttoning my pajamas, taking me in
’Are you going home tonight? Yes. Never mind’
she wiped the words carefully away,

next moment she was gone again. She floated away
as I kissed the back of her neck, popped
a tiny piece of crystallized ginger into her mouth.

’It’s difficult to swallow. You’re gone again’, she
said into my eyes, seeing a startled world, so
many pieces of blank floating there. ‘You are
in pain’, she said, ‘I will heal you’. I laughed
at the way she mispronounced the words,

it was her pain.

 

She rubbed almond oil into my warmth, starting
to dissolve. ‘I had a dream’, she said with her
fingers. ‘I was on a ship, sailing home to nowhere.
I stowed away. Two sailors were looking for me
but I was naked, invisible. I touched their legs.
They did not move. Then I heard a tune in the wind.
as I rubbed, they disappeared, but the tune
remained. The ship turned into a gull, spread its
wings and flew to the horizon. I watched it sink’.

 

‘What do you think?’ She opened her eyes at me.
I looked into her irises but she was gone, flying
into the wind.

 

‘Close my page when you go’, I said. She did not
hear me. Flying into the wind.