CHOREOGRAPHY OF A TRANCE
for R.L.B.

∗

She touched the moonlight in my body where I'd marked time
in Bloody Mary hotels clutching strip mall ghosts.

Panting above dead mortgage soap operas and nuptial traffic,
she pulled me into the kinetic moment.

Sovereign flies bit our naked backs
like dreams of wild sugar.

∗

I found her on the edge of a bar
burning like a detective novel with a gasoline haircut.

We chased the voltaic animal of the jukebox
through the blown fields in our minds.

I tuned October to the muffled bass deep
in her solar plexus.

Zodiac towers tugged at her womb
and an arm rose like a flower from sleep's museum.

We grew ether stubble behind rented walls
and wrote voodoo sonnets beneath the bank clock.

I ran my hand along her spine and felt the current of electricity
that reached from a belt loop to the red moon above Lincoln Avenue.

∗

I emptied into her:
chains and buckets and bosses,
loss and homage and refrain.

Laughter that broke into the secret hospitals
where people turned into cats
and killed the manic surgeons who breathed on death.

Her eyes were frontier asylums for trapped black horses.
Target vessels with cargo of hyacinth and oil.

Theater of the sea
where nocturnal gulls snapped up shadow fish.

I built churches around them
and lived for months without eating.

∗

We rolled through Kmart sheets and alarm clock chords.
The telephone rang for breath and the doorknob ovulated.

We pulled knives from each other's waists
and planted satellites in the cracks.

She put her ear to the pagan radio in my heart
and heard the sewer clashing of phosphorescent angels.

I saw buses float like birds.
The very air conceived me.

It rained her eyelashes.
It poured her name.

∗

Against the wall I clawed the swaggering bell of her ass.
From her mouth a calico owl tore bits of burning stationary.

Upon her thick black hair my fingers puzzled like slaves.

I knew the bite of her teeth,
the curve of her back,
her long white neck I chewed like a murmuring cloud.

I slept in the sweat on her stomach,
and our entire lives had time for us.

John Goode