But when some Spring
Hunches its way to clamber onto me –
My limbs will surge into it
Like ink flowing to the nib.
I am not steady as I write this. I take no pains.
I make no denials. I watched

The metronome of your wrist to mimic it.
But my heart chased its vessels hungrily,
Each vein housing the wild ebb
That I could not control. I remember
When you folded your hands over
My eyes, I felt the same regularity beating

Against my lids. They were almost twins,
Almost children. From the first pulse of your
Breast against mine, you had warned of old offspring
Lurking on the shelves, poised to fall like
Angular ghouls onto your bed. Those
Children that were the progeny of a first
Marriage to your own mythology. How

Glumly they cheered our processes, your
Autobiography whooping in the crawlspace
When he heard the crumb of past you fed me.
A slender volume of prose, wryly praised,
Mocked your sudden famine, as ink bled itself

In vain to breed another beating magnum opus
We both knew would not come to term.
As my belly blossomed and bloomed,
Round and tight, a sealed drum, you would curl
Your fingers round the plug, birthing a steady
Throb of ink. And I would give those children
brothers. I wonder if you understood. I watched as you

Stored your swords with the ones
Who flowed from your own fountain,
And left the nibs collecting dusk. Can’t you
See that this is still an insult of an apology?
To recount with glazed eyes, for example,
The night we ghosted the pools

Of murk and deep beside your house.
When I sunk like a coin dropped in wine
And dreamed the tentacles of kissing squid
So violently that my body was as raised and red
As some ancient painted page. You could
Not see the letters as they pricked their way

To my surface. I remind you to
Excuse myself, to write some wry litany
Of little lovers, who outlast no contemporaries.
I will not blame you for blaming me. You
Warned me of the old children,
Who had sucked out all

Your silky oils. I am sorry for the dreams
I stole- I am sorry for the after-light white
My fingers ghosted across your spine.
Round and hilled, and I lost myself
In the great valley of your vertebrae.
I am sorry to have loosed you

Howling through the lonely houses
Siphoning artificial dreams through
Melancholy straws. I am sorry to have sent you
Screaming into silence –
While my belly swelled with thought
Whose kicking felt like that final

Sunday when you fit your hips
Into my sockets, lamenting me unnatural.
As if I had skulked around the edges of your
Black tea dreams, scraping my nails
On the metal words you stored there.

And cornered between some jade statue
Of a heavy-breasted foreign queen
That we had bought with your chapters,
And the weakness of your wrist wrenched
Around mine, I just wanted to wrench back
And scrawl, and scribble, and scratch.

You could feel my pulse. It was throbbing.

I am sorry.