Silent Proof

(On Nights I'd Called My Corner of the Room)

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I hope you’ll forgive me for recording this while I had a cold.

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Silent Proof (On Nights I’d Called My Corner of the Room)

Where first the toes of teenage boys
Desanctified the church, I slept
With sleeping bag upon the soiled floor.
I watched them scale the cinder walls,
Their laughter not so much unlike the hum
Of amplifiers in an empty room. 
By then, of course, the golden glow 
Of vacuum tubes was absent in the nave
And all the light we had was from the bare
Fluorescents, cold and sterile—
Unsuitable for sleep. 
Restless as I was, I wandered out
The double doors where, in the distant dark,
The centaur's pot above me hung
Like pyrite specks a fool might chase
Into the deep. However close
Those scattered constellations might appear,
Uncounted time stood between one and next. 

But what I wish to say about those nights
On borrowed beds in backwoods Tennessee
Is, as the archer bent his bow of light,
He aimed my mind at our geometry;
At how parabolas of time and space
First closed the distance 'tween us ere we spoke;
At how along that closing curve I raced
Till that Pythagorean darkness broke; 
At how the tenon of your heel did fit
Between the mortise of my toes; at how
Your shapely lips formed sentences whose wit
At any volume was exposed; and now
What once seemed law this silent proof proves whim:
Your eyes you angle not toward me but him. 

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Special thanks to

Kate Bluett

for her help workshopping the final couplet of this poem.