An Invitation

[not_art_not_war]

A Portait of Marthe, The Restless
(for Nabokov)

Moving like a piece of marble on
a stone floor, she draws near
me & my guard, all the weight
of a lead horse,
with none of the smell.

Lips like a keyhole,
leaking loose truths
about who,
and when,
and home many times

and the sounds he made
her make,

is this not hell enough?
mold-rife prison of the crippled
imagination,
are you insufficient, alone?

of teaching me the error
of my ways or,
rather, the error of
her ways?

A swan with a limp neck
makes no flight home.

and so she floats sweetly in
a pool of easily extracted affection

"I did it again today," he
wrote that
she said,
pressing one tiny stretch
of flesh against
another.

And how am I to sleep,
accused and insufficient
as she sluts gently with
the friends of my family and
my own slick companions?

Waves of unwound lust broken on
shores of honey-sweet wet infidelity on
the sheets I bought her in Tangiers?
I toss and weep sleeting sweat
on my neighbors couch, as her
mouth burns holes in my
pillow cases with the gifts
of her sex,

even as an unwanted hand drifts
weakly past my knee.