Hurricane Season
       

When I become accustomed at last to lying in bed alone,
      sheets finely wrinkled as curtains blown across the windows

of dreams, and the crane-necked streetlight fills the room
      with its electric-nerved, luminous vision, what I had

seen for my future (the restless flowering of his arms in sleep
      around my shoulder, the soiled pillows in their matching cases

where our faces, breaths apart, turned toward and away) recedes
      like the hurricane that never hit land the night we met,

when the beach was evacuated, the buildings shuttered in plywood,
      and the news crews stood dry amid the whipping palms,

in the margins of their own story. Later, we saw a photograph shot
      high in the clouds: the storm's eye turning above the ocean,

as we swam at midnight in the pool naked, waiting to be swept up
      in a chlorine shudder, a geyser of winds, into the rapture

of our lives. And though we almost bought it together, we didn't.
      Somewhere, framed in its calm bay of glass, that storm is hanging—

on the gallery's wall at the pinpoint end of this land, or in a room
      like the one where even now he is lying beside her, sleep's

aperture narrowing around them, and all the years when we almost
      loved each other forever, at last, blown far off the shore of this life.

Copyright © 2009 Alexandra Teague All rights reserved
from Mortal Geography
Persea Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission