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Lapse
On the end tables are photographs of two sons lost
to war, to accidents. And on the table before me
is the picture I have colored in Sunday School
that morning, and have given to my grandmother.
Blessed are the meek, it says above my black
and blue crayoned Earth, suspended between God's
white, idle hands, all of it ours to inherit.
LAPSE
Five years later, you're still in the doorway,
talking to me in twisted dream patois,
your hair cut random and snarled, your expression
hangdog, little boy. And when I wake up
from your visits I'm happier,
like a battered woman after the fists have finished
and she feels herself again, all over.
I lie there still inside the dream's bruise,
treating it as real news of you,
as concern. It colors everything.
For a moment in this numb November dawn
the slant, daylight English you left me with
falls away like outmoded slang,
and what remains is what I want to believe
about why you still dream yourself here.
I draw myself into the last pocket of night
and whisper to you in our first language.
I let myself fall back five more minutes
into this narrow, warm bed of habit,
into love's native Esperanto.