BITCH-WANTS
I’ve lived like a greyhound bred to pursue
a dog track’s inedible wool-toy rabbit,
teased toward a sense of non-food to tear into,
choked on dead dryness whenever I caught it.
The maze itself was my Minotaur.
Even in loving I’d bang a locked door,
in heaviest weathers raging like Lear —
insane, this fret to be sated, noticed.
Hearth fire, cooking-fire, shouts of the children,
wife’s foot pressed against man’s hard foot,
these speak to us, though we’d sell our birthright,
trade deep heat for a bargain price-tag,
all the while knowing that joy begins
high in a mountain encampment with friends
or from total work like jogging hard miles
in a dream, no room for anything
but life. Who’ll shimmer in coffin-clothes?
And yet bitch-wants demand their kiss
though day in its glory is cloth of gold
and night a bottomless sea.
29