I Could Read History Books But Women Stagger So Easily

You said, “Alison, Kent State,” and I said, “No,
the Chianti,” and when your voice caved in
I opened the blind, only to see
the campus fill with tear gas. There
Ohio’s air will not revive you and inside
I raise a glass and toast Mao and James
Dean, draw maps on the pillow cases, couple
our hands and concentrate on clock ticks.
On the red sheets’ shallow graves
our fingers fit tightly. Two more bottles
and we will speak for the dead.

It’s late so we turn down the Beatles

and see Alison Krause and others
fall victim to white out, lives tilted down-
ward by the Cuyahoga’s lifting schemes.
The quadrangle becomes clotted
with uniforms and upraised rifles--
children flee to the Victory Bell,
others bend under the elms’ broken arms,
covered in ash, tar, and blood.

Now each morning gravel dust clings
to girls leaning out dorms
thirsting for boxes of bones and rooms
without views, the asphalt
reminding them that there is more
outside their heads than in.

Classes and meals and the midwest suck
as tile tears at their feet
in the showers. It’s easier
for me: Earl Grey and Beefeater,
pointless painting, and no labor.
Don’t drive or drift away--
it’s that time again and you can’t spell
or remember parking spaces, re-interviewing
eyewitnesses, telescoping photos,
never thankful that I enjoy mysteries.
It’s pouring so I will knit your eyes dry,

now and always, so that I can claim
my wavering wants, because I read
your cheapened springtime desires. Don’t we dream
that your body will re-bloom?
The media begins to call, you have to catch a plane
to the end of the world, and you move
your white hands through your breakfast
only to see Alison look back,
cry out, get shot through the head, falling
softly into the patchy turf, ghosts
holding up her smooth skin, hands
now each night in someone else’s arms.