We were outside she asked if I like zippers I said I had
to go that you, my wife, waited at home

I called you twice to prove it but you didn’t answer and
she asked what I was afraid of

Merwin had just read this poem, “Peire Vidal”

and she was next to me not wearing pants
just Eighties-like black leggings, a thin zip-up sweatshirt hooded

zippers over each elbow unzipped
Sounds insane I know but
her elbows were like

two North Stars fighting for a sailor’s attention

I remembered an Italian fashion designer I heard on BBC Radio who said every year the industry covers one female body-part and reveals another in order to keep intrigue and interest and I looked stared at her elbows

I could’ve been seven or eight pressed
against F.A.O. Schwarz’s glass-front façade drooling like I did
at twenty-two in Barcelona when
that Australian girl
Ashley, Alex, no Margaret—
she said MAR-ga-RET—
jumped on me the morning after I pissed in this Malta girl’s boots who said she couldn’t wake me so she prayed to Mary I’d stop, but I was “like shower eternal”

Apparently Mary couldn’t wake me either I was a bad oracle so the Malta girl wouldn’t sleep with Josh who I’d traveled with for thirty-days who’s still pissed who’d brought her a rose in the club and Margaret held the one I’d brought her in her teeth She was Juliet 

and I was so hung-over I couldn’t
remember my lines but she kissed me and
kissed me tickled my neck with the rose the petals fell off on my skin—

The point is Jesus I fell for elbows
I told her so after the reading
I said I don’t mean to be creepy
but you have beautiful elbows and she looked at me like
the German girl I accidentally dropped on some discotheque’s dance floor in Munich who made me kiss her cheek and bow before she’d keep dancing but

the elbow girl
she said

I must be insane nobody looks at elbows
Then what’s with your shirt I said and
she said she had a thing for zippers
liked to play with them

It’s cliché fucking cliché she came like a hurricane she was
what you hated in your father what he couldn’t resist the storm drinking
your mother to death
What I vowed not to

I showered then before
coming to bed to you and she came to me again in sleep reaching

like she did for my zipper in her backseat I was crying I left my body and you
She liked that I cried She said it

would feel good and it did and I let her and she let me and
your father was right about me Farmers feel the rain two days away