O little sail, how quickly you become
a pocket’s wad or rumpled cloud inside
the corner of a purse. You get one glance
across a runny playground nose, one daub
of graveyard tears and then we crush you up
as waste, our intimate embarrassment.
Perhaps there is some dignity at least
in being passed, pristine still, in your box
pastiched with tulips, to soften a blow:
I’ll help you leave him. We can bury
her dog tags. You have six months or less.
Perhaps there is some puny majesty
with new couples, nervous, panting in the glow,
who pluck you for the aftermath of love.
My friend’s son, who stays a boy who’s trapped
inside the body of a man, who closes
his eyes every other morning when a hand
that is not his shaves stubble from his face,
knows enough to hide the evidence of night.
My friend doesn’t mind you, tissue, balled
and tossed beneath a bed. Each weekend when
he crawls to clean, he finds you light as light,
still bright past damaging, like the body
of the baby wren a cat left on my stoop.
To spare my sons I mummied it in you.
In our darkened woods you matched the snow
and hid for me the bankruptcy of flight.