This is How It Starts

Church bells, car alarms, crunching
over hard slush salting brick-lined sidewalk
and this is how it starts: delirium
and drag, brunch hour yet longing
for sleep. Hair matted, tangled
tucked around the neck, a stolen
rope of Hard Red Winter. Skin newly
dry, released to light from weight
of down and sheet. Dim to the day,
eyes called upon as touch moans,
sighs. Retires. This is how it starts:
a few dead flowers, the phone a hall
to the room of your voice. The wanting
to be held, the holding, the withholding
the with you and without you charting
time. Like fishing, like waiting
like the lure, like the bite, like the line
the line tugging, and the flailing, the
resistance, like rising, now, yes
surfacing, yes, landing, yes, arriving
yes now this is how it starts: home’s
doorway a reversion to dawn. Key
releasing, entry—each stair ascended
a sigh. Blood a peaked drip and
what’s left, fever hot; above the heart
blotches of blanch and flush; the day
uncurls like a sunbeam, burning and
this is how it starts.

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