At Ease

The magic:
If you hold your wet hand up to a candle in the dark,
it steams,
The watersmoke shimmering up to mingle with your breath.
I have
A friend who snores.
She knows
To lie with me in the morning beneath the ballooning curtains
without speaking,
Knows what it is to swallow her own head.
We drift,
Loose-eyed, lolling, resting on placid stomachs.
Sometimes, blinks.
I wonder what it is to line up the blood like attentive soldiers,
the endless
Rigid parallels of cited tables.
Dawn cracks
And sparks in the dimples of her pupils every few weeks;
I sigh
Into another lake of a month.
She snores.