Dina and Dan Reveal To Us An Unknown Force

''I have desired the love of a man''

            -Helen Keller

We were standing in my apartment

For what was going to be a miracle

A few minutes later

When the man knocked and said

Would anyone care if I joined

And a few minutes after that

We would lose track of him

His crown and groaning

Nachmittag, one droolstrand of light

Soaked the hardwood floors.

We could've done our exercises.

The moon had demanded

Hardwood floors, the surfaces

The moon had languished into

In a vessel of doing

Adrift clouds as peoples are

The moon had not said though

It was right there, at the foot

The middle, the midden of the day

When a few minutes later

It was no longer apparent

We would not remain contemplative

I could get my fist in,

Nor the bigger thing, a parakeet

Would be a moon of parakeets.

Is it by any chance protoplasm?

When that was asked a few minutes later

We would not think

Parakeet and protoplasm

We would not say the words

A parakeet thinks about the loss of weather

It would only say so like it had

When it wanted a cracker

When it had been wanting a cracker it was given

Here, on a long ripple of protoplasmic moonlight

An instruction to mean what it said

It meant, you were not here

To greet us as liberators

The installers of wicket gates into garden walls

The lifters of latches

Though that was what we rashly fumbled for

The white linen sheets meant peace, they cried

At regular intervals in cathedrals converted people prayed

For people in beds spaced in regular intervals

In hospitals in which the power had gone out

Were in fact being powered by generators

That were failing, but when they fled the scene

No one would be there to record the fires they had stopped worshipping

Nor would anyone not tell you to stop worshipping

The rain drizzled through buttresses like hair

You were not slandered or made to seem so eager

And you were not like this

Or taken from the nest, to wriggle in the morning your things within her

But it does not redeem a moon

Nor is possibility rediscovered

We were waiting for chairs so we could play musical chairs

Yet nothing moved

When we opened the doors

The moon but itself

Or the gusts of cold air

When we fled a few minutes later and lost track of the number

Its outbursts, a variety of the old kind

Barely visible, but the hostile stars

Too, a point of reference, the stomachs

Which might have been empty

Were really empty and the cold water

Was moonwater, the room constrained by its room

will be empty,

unfriendly as these exercises