The Price of Every Kindness

It will do you no good to enlist the dialogue
of parallel priests and thieves.
All is over before it has begun,
tongued into the wide abscess of morning air
holding nothing but the birth of clouds
in labor, cold in the tea-stained sky
of your numb feelings.

Would there be comfort in that stone, the jealous kiss?
Could it mean anything, to hear the vagrant wrestling
of timid light skirting imagined lovers on the floor?

Your eyes have fallen ten times too often
and have seen the one other movement;
a chronicle of betrayals cast downward
across a vestment of pain and silence.
You have created your own de chirico world,
with green shadows and bitter sun, and have left
some opening for this pain.

Pick up your own heart again,
lay it open and beating on your new lover's breast.

Choose an empty sorrow to bury at night
- a stolen coffin of birth, swathed in new love's light.