I

She was missing a molar.
The black gap flashed,
proclaimed her poverty
while she poke of the past.
"I am two thin slices
from comfort and know
you wait to exhume
what I've let go.
Your mind is a palace,
mine is a grave.
I will not make
my memories slave."

His shirt offends her.
Her chair scalds.
His hung certificates
simply gall.

"The lamps of Novi Sad,"
she said, "shimmer for me.
The rugs of Uzbek
unscroll their reds;
The pinot of Lucca
warms in the plaza glass.
But I am Biafra.
I am the past."

She lifted her head.
"Is it enough?"
Kestral-quick
The question fled.
His eyes flickered.
Hers were dead.

II

He fingered his tie.
Heartache, loss—
what else did she say?
Those were the reasons why?

The sick were impossible
sloes of seminal thirst.
He swiveled his chair
reversed a photo,
framed—wife, fair
children, dog—windowpane.
to all she cursed—
his pat control, his
Hippocratic oath.
He rolled his eyes,
fingered his tie.

Hours with her were strung
like regular beads,
one, then nothing, one.
Perhaps in three years
her chalice of unrelieved
urges would crack,
or a choir of screams
would preface her battle
back, or a mired idea
would stun her drawn
face, giving her a taste,
a niggardly rage.

He dreamed the whole show.
And the limp linen letter
with its wretched date
was safely stowed.
A month's rerouting,
a lawer's blue script,
the mother's scribbled proof
and dilute bequest.
Her somewhere death.

He fed it into the room's
fiction, where it bled
on the carpet threads.

III

Sadness arrived by wind livery
and lay, lifeless and heavy, in the reds
of the Kazakhstan. Even in death
it mesmerized, and spayed the rival
breast of hope, as though all myth
could be so easily slain.

                             "So," she said,
sailing into a cadmium yellow
sound, beyond the fat and lapping
waves of speech, where words
lay netted in a westward lagoon,
and she was bound for a circling blue,
two degrees aft, forever.