Heatwave
She almost makes it
through the first week.
They've stacked
his boxes
by the curb; one night
it
rains, diaphanous sheets,
she knows she ought to feel glad—
feel
something—
but all she can picture is
his set of
Vonnegut;
damp pages clinging
like tentative
hands.
She wishes now
they'd gotten
to Mexico,
stunned into quietude
by bougainvillea's
brightness,
co-conspirators in the mosaicked heat.
Given the
choice,
they would travel by train,
fumbling over
the stacks of bills
smelling of sweat and a thousand palms;
the small
man behind the wicket
sunning, early siesta.
They'd cram
the bags
in overhead bins,
old diesel
engine panting,
part with nickels for mangoes
and nip back
the pungent skin.
Trace the palm lines of hills.
But the rain,
now;
that dampens everything
past repairing.
How could she have told him
that it's
really about
the way light falls in a high room
midsummer,
the wind picking out
the scent of lemons and beeswax
from old furniture,
the lawn lounging
uncut and insouciant.
The
heat is what he doesn't understand—
that, and the way sunlight cuts
whitely through
unsashed windows;
how she likes to stand with the glare
refracting
over her. Stripping her clean.
Something about
being
prismatic.
Asking nothing.
