The Joy

her

joy is kept close, in a body-strapped satchel.
Wrapped and stitched. Woven. She
has a way with memory

	and it’s stored

in a weight around her hips, every bounce
could shift this kitchen we dance in,
sunlight streaming through the window

and glancing off her chin – face lifted
skyward like a sun spire – something
her morning throat kissed.

	I swear

something ancient told us. Cherish
all these late-night mornings, that
this is how I’ll remember

the music in a moment and
that longing for connection and
the floorboards groaning under

	her footsteps

thumping to a sunrise. Pounding out 
the dawn-break. This
is how I’ll remember

her
 
New Year’s Eve

My favorite girl was a dancer
- in Tampa, no less –
but when her legs unfurled,

joint slipping over joint, a mottled
portrait of an American
dream stepping through,

she’d tell me anything I asked,
like the hour, the very minute
of sunrise, anywhere in the world.

In Japan, she says, the sunlight lasts
fourteen hours. And as it slips
over the Silent Forest

- and did you hear about the dead there? –
it’s almost asking to be caught,
the way the warmth catches your throat

and pulls your words
up from your belly.
I’d squint, inscrutable and ask,

How could you know? And her leg
would simply lower, the fat
beneath her belly flattening, 

and she’d say Nah, not now.
Leave it to the birds.
Let them catch

some wind. That’s where the light lives.
Above us, in the air, in the salt-licked
trenches. Sometimes 

I still think about her. All that time.

I think and I sit and I think, rubbing
my palm against my head, some dumb
ape, puzzling through the words

some dancer once told me
in Tampa, in July.