The Rehearsal

for Katherine and Meredith.

The last time I saw D. was a thick black night in September.
Autumn had just begun,

my knees were cold inside my clothes.
A chill fragment of moon rose.
He stood in my living room and spoke

without looking at me. Not enough spin on it,
he said of our three years of love.
Inside my chest I felt my heart snap into two pieces

which floated apart. By now I was so cold
it was like burning. I put my hand out
to touch his. He moved back.

I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy.
But now he was looking at me.
Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.

Everything gets crazy. When nude
I turned my back because he likes the back.
He moved onto me.

Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself

thrusting my big burning blue backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.
There was no area of my mind

not appalled by this action, no part of my body
that could have done otherwise.
But to talk of body and mind begs the question of
soul and its existence.

Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.
He stayed with me.
We lay on top of the covers as if it weren’t really a night of sleep and
time,

caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language
like the children we used to be.
That was the night that centered Heaven and Hell.

We tried to fuck
but he remained limp, although happy. I came
again and again, each time accumulating lucidity,

until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down
on the two souls clasped there on the bed
with their mortal boundaries

visible around them like lines on a map.
I saw the lines harden.
He left in the morning.