Say you’re desperate to believe in anything
other than the accusation light is
as it makes it impossible to deny the body of the woman,
asleep, half-covered by the disarray of damp sheets
that seem a message written in cursive
by a mad composer who only wanted to be
sure his music wouldn’t be forgotten.
The very music the orchestra had played
the evening this woman, clothed in a gown
that could have been said to clarify her body
in ways that could’ve made any breath
a composition Bartok wrote down in a fever
brought on by a cacophony of ghosts & lust
& the sincerity of the fear of what it means
to give all this up,
this breath & longing & lack of understanding
we call being alive. The same music
playing this very moment on the radio of a car
passing by with its windows down
as the woman shifts ever so slightly under the sheets
so her movement is the music,
memory nothing more
than the desire to keep everything
moving the way the air had
the night this woman kissed you the first time
& her breath entered your body by means of that kiss
& nothing, you knew, would be
what it was or had been or could’ve been
before that brief joining of labial flesh
as the sounds of birds careening in the dimming sky
& ghosted in the river
entered what would become the memory
of that kiss & every loss it would lead to.
George Looney’s recent books include The Visibility of Things Long Submerged, which won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Award, and The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible, which won the Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize. He founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, and edits Lake Effect.
