Harmonicas

We'll all need babysitters

Is what the saxophone madam plays

Braced against a tunnel mouth

Sounds like the night gently pulls her into itself

Sounds like the late trains pulling out

In black tie, and lace

Tonight

On the waiting platform of your neck

Is a quintet of harmonicas, in my fingers for you, my girl

Been kissing their steel electric

bruises between your nape & ears like

stormswept chimes

they tip into the last car headed

down your railing

calling the lights low

like how the nights go

in my memory of the fabric of those Skies

how all the stars hung taut on harps that summer.

In the evenings blushing india ink

Rouged with he day's final crackling

There was a Loom hung over us

weaving fresh curtains of tarot,

fortunes funhouse bent

around my headlights stumbling

to meet you

for the first time and then

again and

again

now,

in my fingertips for you, my girl

five throats, diviners of winds

are grazing the

I Ching

where your shoulders rune together

and you have skin like

lightning hummed by the desert

after a glass of fine wine,

they are playing how the rain and wind and orphan sands

call this color of yours Mother

and the nights fade

like how the lights raised

on the dust that had covered my bedroom for decades

the day after I took you onto my tongue

and all things took the flavor of your dancing

my throat unbottling a choir of fireflies

molten with tales of how

the sky can disagree with itself

until that perfect moment when the moon wins

and you arrive, slightly damp

off the private coast of my cradled whisper

modest claims it was just the autumn rain

modest thanks for picking you up

but my fingers,

the hard drinking pastors they are,

they know better to whom thanks is due,

how I failed outstriking the winter

and its bosses and its rain whipped the nerves off me,

left bloody all of my feelings

bloated with late television and dreamlessness for months,

american zombified,

you nursed me around this dream of us

given charge of this fresh parcel of god

you held us all here,

in the carriage of your low back

five harmonicas

whispering their low thanks

while you sleep

with the saxophone madam

outside our window

while I hold this dream of ours