Dead Lift

I lay on my back and ground smooth the seams joined underneath by nets to mud dust. No, I stood and looked into the whiteness of the sky and scrubbed the clouds. No, it was a rhythm of static crawling into my arms as they sanded. I stood on a ladder and saw through a mask. That day finished in my lungs and left itself in my eyes as well as everyone’s. The black racing stripe along the walls was later, the crushed snake on the road you had to bring down a brick upon stayed sooner. Listen: all the invisible bones hang still across the shower rod, that bath stripped of its cream skin to show blue tiles beneath the fifties. It was the loveliest color I ever burned onto my hands in secret silence. And you found it, as someday all vapours will find the sky. How what we see stays up, even these by now completed directions fail to make clear. And then, as though this story might continue tomorrow, I sat next to the azalea I called a rhododendron and the rhododendron you called an azalea; I sat on the concrete cuff and heaved my way through a quart of ice and lemonade you handed me. It wasn’t that day but some other, in some other, transomless room, when I spotted you last, my upward grip as light as flour on my hands, so heavy on another’s.