Saturday Morning

Here are the only things I’ve ever

had to say about acceptance.

One has to accept

the tense of a feeling and

One must accept

one’s own sustenance or starve.

I was so directive once.

But even back then

I was talking to myself,

and myself as miscreation.

I’m thinking about all this

in our bed, where I’ve awoken

in the apostrophetic

darkness, to find I must,

once again, push

the button for morning

with my mind

by imagining I glow

around the edges

just like it.

So I may sweep slowly upward.

So I may be opened unto.

The enigmatic doorman

has once again left me

his dark blue suit.

The unlaundered dawn.

With two neat rows

to weave. Gold into holes.

It’s always the same.

As he withdraws,

naked as a jailbird, he calls:

This is all you will have

for eternity! Then I turn

to look at my beloved,

who is my true beloved.

This suit, my only suit.

And so I begin. My old

fingers, poorly assembling.

Though some part of me,

by Jove!, will have run off,

back into my bare sovereignty.

In a lifetime,

it is acceptable

to envy the authorship

of only one line.

Mine is:

The suit I wore

tomorrow,

my laundress

has not laundered it.

Yes, Vallejo. But it could be

my beloved talking,

in her floating language

of beautiful but impossible

tenses. Tonight, I tell myself,

tonight, I left

a note in the breast pocket.

The one I press

my hand to now. It’s a riddle

about transience, for the doorman.

What must you accept

newly every day?

Listen, I know it could happen

at any moment. One of us

will bring a hand to our chest

before letting go, entirely.

Of the answer to the riddle.

You’ll stay with me, I hope,

just a moment or two,

I’ll stay with you, I say

into the air. A cold animal,

insistent against the heat of us.

What must you accept

newly every day?

The answer is the body,

of course.

It could be on a Saturday,

morning, I’ll add, like this one.