What Actually Exists

After I shimmied into these voluminous robes, I made a series of choices.
Tonight, the bartender lines-up a glut of riches, dried limes, dried lemons, borage and violets, pimento-in olives.
I didn’t choose this, you say, as you remove the garnish from your cocktail.
There’s no escaping February, I say and, blue flowers are very rare.
What I can call back into existence is almost nothing.
Did your young father smoke a cigarette on the way to work?
Did your mother wash and dry the household’s brushes and combs each week?
H.D. bemoaned the chef, ate the soup anyway, bemoaned the psychiatric couch, still revealed her dreamscapes.
Haven’t we all scooped a stunned bird off the sidewalk at dusk, woken to a kitchen of feathers
and desperation. Tonight I said things I probably didn’t mean, things I won’t repeat. You
did too. What’s the mind working on when it yields to the body, your hands following the curve
of my hips in the quiet dark, pale cyclamen edging something wilder. Every
icy morning you warm-up the car in the alley, know
I’ll meet you there. It’s usually enough.