Fever

Alone, which has grown to mean without you,

     I sweat in our old bed. In the bay, the storm’s orchestra tunes.

Thunder, and my next expression is one of yours.

     As if in need of something lost, wind tears

through the garden. It checks all my blooms. Rain

     falls in curtains from the roof of the porch, a thin

gap where arms could part them, hems of clattering hail.

     Foghorns tunnel through salty haze, the full-

of-vapor sound of a vanished horizon, roaming and slow.

     Like a conductor’s elbows, the wings of a crow

rise tip to tip and hover in the naked readiness that spreads

     from the sea, through swirling reeds, to the bed

where I ache and roll. The lilac light falls suddenly dim.

     Blinking through sweat, I imagine: you’ve just left and will come

back for me soon, a bouquet of ice in your arms.

“Fever” first appeared in The Paris Review, No. 192, Spring 2010, and is from The Tulip-Flame (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014).