nothing stands in the way
of what the darkness is bringing:
above me, you are a shape
tunneling under a green lawn of wool,
breathing beyond my hands—
the last color bleached out of the tissue
of sense, the last connection
shattered by the last truth, the last grip
on the world spoken by pain,
as it should be, the last houses
in the picture of life on the wall burned
by deaths we wanted and feared and chose
finally, the last resource of love distrusted,
the surf of white cotton
edging out of sight under the blanket
and one hand with an empty web of hair merging
at the top where the hulk babbles and shifts and holds,
and being a man who knows it
and does not know
+++++++++++++++++++++someone pulls back the sheets,
gets under and slips into the woman
who sleeps no more deeply than we do
and is kind, always kind, to the naked
lost man who is nothing and there.