A Flame in Your Heart
Charles Bernstein
As slow as Methuselah and as old as
does anything about it ö the soda water
in the bedroom wants more cookies and milk
Once you came to me in a shadow
and I don't know how to count the years
since, since counting is just the thing I
am learning not to do. Your bracelet
adorns your wrist like a knight in ardor
crying for a key to the tumbledown cabin
on the dunes. A bonnet repairs what
the billy-goat embargos ö ocean of this
close and then again, until all the folds
like actors in a made-for-TV mini-series,
at the end of a pier on a blind alley or
on a steamship or in a crowded piazza in
an unidentifiable Italian city that turns
out to be
scene and so am I but we don't recognize
each other because we've gone beyond
all that. Then the signal blasts with
unendurable music and we collapse into
the sound, into ourselves as make-believe
as any devout hugamug with a hankering
for infinite finitude: Just a walk down the street
of the imaginary enclosure that becomes real
when shared.
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