There’s a body rising from the living room
floorboards, rising to kiss the mantelpiece—
a great humpback whale in the center of the room.
It could be the humidity
or a drop of sweat from last we fucked
the couch ensconcing us there.
Your bile has conjured [ __ ] before.
It’s not unreasonable to think that
this time it’s [a body]. Remember
the time we kissed moth
to moth? I could believe there were [dead things] in there.
Several thoughts have dovetailed in my mind:
the way you spooned me sugar cubes & laid me down.
You always told me the desert is filled with dead
but that it exists to preserve, like a museum,
or a mausoleum or something in between,
something from the basement making itself known.

This past weekend your palm plant died,
the one your grandmother had given you.
You explained to me how it happened,
how mites laid themselves in the roots
& how you tried to remove them
first dousing the fronds with insecticide
then pruning, taking the basin outside.
On the porch, the palm of six years died.
In a period of mourning you moved
the upright grand from your parents’ place
to the room in Yonkers with all the light
and that one tapestry of the white man on the white horse.

You sat down that night at the bench,
poured yourself into a fugue until
the sheet music was too wet to read.