CO-DEPENDENCY
CO-DEPENDENCY
(For Vanessa)
1
My chocolate, my tobacco
and you across the river, my three
addictions: you analyze
the toxicity of love; I appeal
to your vanity, waltzing you patiently
through my analysis – my fear
of losing you palpable, thick
as clouds, as smoke; I fear your drift, I fear
you are fixing the tobacco, I fear
you are sweet as chocolate.
I confess patiently to you going down sometimes
to the river devouring chocolate, smoking,
imagining myself a smooth, smooth
stone skipping madly,
madly on the wings of my addiction,
blithely into Brooklyn. You,
afraid of my loco-
motion: ever the psycho-
therapist, manically explain the mechanics
of the breasts, vis-à-vis the
good breast and the bad breast, while
I explain patiently to you to try
smearing them with chocolate
so I might love them both.
I imagine you, lowing, my favorite
cow in the whole of Brooklyn. I imagine chocolate
milk; I imagine the greenest grass.
2
I like your bracelets – your
bangles. You love
my raspberry jam. At my age
I want only raspberries. This information
gives you the blues. It’s a lot
like America these days – all red
and blue: your aura all red
while I am berry blue: your skin, covered
in goose bumps, is like fresh raspberries; your
veins purple as figs pulsing over the neighbors fence.
I am fresh as Adam, reading you like a school boy,
boning up, eager to learn myxolodics.
3
You nibble at the edge
of the river like a bulimic, devouring
the finite with all the gusto
of Saturn: certain
delicacies you say excusing yourself,
you have trouble with;
You dine on cuckoo, you dine on willow. Reading
shells, excrement, from
the feathers of wild geese, the gooey entrails
of sheep, examining tiny seeds,
bits of vegetable matter,
paper, paint, I parse your bones: tibia,
hip, clavicle, rib. You snore
like Demeter. I examine legumes, chocolate
coins. Lighting a candle,
I discover you asleep, curled into
a ball like a porcupine.
I discover you floating
among the cattails in your garden,
I discover you in your bath.
4
It’s pumpkin time.
My grin a jack o’lantern
leering from every window.
Your chagrin is basic black,
the fishnet stockings requisite, the
jagged quartz in which
you view the world
in fractals; curious trees, birds,
flowers, shuffling gnomes, enchanted
shadows phantoms; grotesque,
misshapen. Signs shut suddenly appear
as triangles, wands, pulsing swords,
pentacles: the perverse
season. Dolabriformed leaves
go up in smokes. You say it’s hard to see
the past through all the smoke. I say
from this great height it’s hard to see anything
without my glasses. Consulting the oracle,
you say you’re seeing asphodels, the frost
is on the pumpkin: I say the bloom
is off the rose.