Manure Work

 

Manure Work
There is every good reason
to shovel you out like the shit I spread
each spring on the garden,
hoping something green will rise from the stink.
She’s sneaky, that one, lungs full of smoke,
and the yellow is showing in her teeth,
in her eyes, starting to show. But I’ll never let you go.
Turn your back on each other—that’s the ticket.
Break the promise you made your mother
when she tucked you in with God and clean sheets.
Turn around. Your back. Each other. You tell me I’ve changed. Well, darling,
even the manure changes once it’s been worked in,
turns black and rich. What’s wrong with changing?
I have become this—clinging, raw, unlovely. Now our friends have packed up their laughter and gone.
Time keeps shoveling forward, and I know
it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong,
the way I pulse for you still, like sonar
from the old days when we swam naked
and the waves slapped our thighs. I remember the stupid things: mood rings
that lied about our love, plastic bracelets
clacking like cheap prayers, nickels and dimes
we split like sacraments. Did you cash in
all your dreams for this? You don’t dream for me.
You don’t dream for me anymore. But that girl is a sunburn I cannot stop tormenting—
blistered and weeping, skin peeling in raw ribbons.
I press hard into the burn, reopening it,
making it throb and leak beneath my hands.
I would like to save her,
or maybe keep her burning open for me.
She’s like a sunburn. She’s like a sunburn
I keep aggravating, salt in the wound,
hoping the pain will never let her heal.