If I have known wrath, it was
a stiffness in your arm
that ran from collarbone to fingertips
the unease of your light bones
and the colorlessness of the whole room
that night,
the way you clenched your elbow
and pressed the concrete air
heavily beneath your feather-steel form
while I moved with all the thickness of flowing hot stone
or a slogged ancient river
wide enough to carry each sloughed-off word
we have ever said. For those words
were always overshadowed with wrath,
the unfolding in events
of a forbidden knowlege
which in the happening and in the knowing
was both a wisdom and a death
such that the wrath of god
was not a conflagration nor a consummation
but only stark stillness and pain.
The gray death of pipes and lanes
and the grayness of the soft skin above your lip
were intricate, specific, terrible pathways,
the embodied power of small impressions
that turn moments one from another
as we from each other have turned away,
you, with the pallor of a deathly saint,
from all contact with my nausea,
and I from you and from the dense, wrathful walls.
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