If You Tolerate This / Frank Golden

In Café Hyena Cynthia tells me how    Whole units of the past have fallen to the margins     Events don’t recede into the map of distance in straight lines anymore    Cynthia’s eyes are speedwell blue her ghost hair straight and white as waterfall silk her skin opaque enough to see warm organs through    She contours the coil of her anxiety and measures an extent of darkness in her colder eye    With her white hair in my hand I am on that torturous road walking naked beside a boat in a lake somewhere upstate with Cynthia topless imitating loons calling from a far shore whuuuuuuuuuuuuWHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu whuuuuuuuuuuuuWHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu     Cynthia tells me she ate raw fish as a child so she might understand the seals she swam with before her blood came    She lays her body on ferns in the same position she found her mother in after she had swallowed the upward  hope of an ogive bullet gilded in zinc    There was a little dent     a little posture of shattered flesh where it kissed the frontal squama then fell behind an ovoid of speckled green granite    I tell Cynthia that as a child I traced the oblique destiny of foraging cancers     watched as they migrated from organs to blood to bone in the children’s cancer ward    There’s a word for every necessary dead thing like toenail clippings   Or   pubic hair scattered in a pile    outside the patio of a cabin on the Megunticook river before the big wind came   Or   the nameless girl who touched the heat    my body  made     above the crescent on my left side   Or   the fate of lovers    deepening    as they moult and renew in the mordant grandeur of their built sarcophagus    Cynthia takes me to her bed   and lavishes   what is left of herself   what there is strength in her to lavish   forgivingly and silently   while I retreat beyond what hope I ever had that the moon in my blood would erase the sundered things I have tended to