body in the river

it was the beginning of april
and the local river had glutted her
banks and shouldered away a man
who'd jumped from the bridge.

when i met a lover who
was a poet and who told me
she was put on this earth
only to change people.

she had full lips,
which is all i
cared to know
about at the time.

she believed also in past lives
and claimed that her prima persona
had originated in 19th
century eastern europe.

i told her, when she asked
what moved me, that i mostly
loved the Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel,
and much of the Dead.

so she wrote a poem
for me that claimed
we'd met on a battlefield
of vietnam as medics, lovers.

it called me, the way an open
door at the end of a dark hallway
calls to a child sprung
from the throes of a nightmare

so i leaped

she smoked a lot and had
experimented with drugs while
attending an ivy league
college and she was an impatient lover.

her mouth was too big
for her face, i thought, and
she said she distrusted men who
spent too much time on foreplay.

but we played it out
all the same, met and
engaged, pitched forward
and back fully.

the snow had been
rained down to weak,
fallow patches in various
spots along the road.

every walk alone outside
smelled like overturned
soil and the renewal
of past conversations.

i found myself walking
a lot those days
and not bothering
to wear a coat

because i wanted to
feel the bite of
the spring wind in
my feverish bones.

the kind of jarring waking
up that comes with
the hard resetting
of a runaway furnace.

or like the plunge in
december waters after an
immersion in the purity
burn of hot springs.

i told her i cared about her,
but i didn't really;
i agreed with her that
we should run away,

but told myself: only to a field
in vietnam, or the capital
city of lithuania before its
fall to the imperial russians;

a long-off escape
in a distant separation
with that cold wind
i felt now stinging the eyes;

to some place
just enough out of the
reach of my own
feeble, dying imagination;

to convince myself that she
was as romantic and
as important to me
as she was to herself.

she didn't love me -
i knew that;
she loved how
the smoking bothered me

but that i didn't complain;
that i had not been to europe
like her; that she had a degree,
unlike me;

that she had expansive stories
and an exotic history
and a resume written
at the knee of the literati.

she teased me about
my unimaginative domesticity,
my narrow, provincial reference,
my impairing lack.

and after that brief
fire, when june came,
she was gone in a
bland ceremony.

against our wills, somewhat,
but not really, and for the best;
i walked the banks of the river
afterwards, from the opposite way.

the cold wind was
gone, the blood back
down to a reasonable
temperature.

they found the body of the
man in a downriver town, bloated
and bobbing, run aground among driftwood.
changed.

i can't listen to the
Byrds anymore;
the Doors, the Stones -
without feeling transposed

i heard years later that
she had a husband and children,
lived in some city as a wife
and no longer writes poetry

i do