with his enquiring step
and typewriter finger,
bring you jacketless back
to my tiers of painted pine?
Can he translate you, locate
the nub of your warm passage,
trace your disorderly plot
from seaboard to killing floor?
In the hazelnut of a power-cut,
when you slept, wasted by
charmer's eyes for days,
I taped your worn spine shut.
The frontispiece I held in bed,
or fed upon like a trove
inside my graceless pocket,
is marred by cup-rings, ash.
Other books? other rooms?
I realign my neurotic library,
the tireless bark of doglike rain
pounding my buttress for entry.
On the cover-blown front,
your lyric intones its own river
in his arms, his bottle, his mouth.
I will rip you, page from page.