I climb over my sleeping boyfriend to check for fires
and I stare at the stove I have not touched in months
all because of a fleeting thought that maybe
my roommate forgot to lower the flame or that I ambled
over in some Klonopin-driven haze
to drowsily turn the knob myself. I allow a laugh
to leak through clenched teeth—this worry of mine is unfinished
until it infects all that’s important. Until I become convinced
that my apartment will crumble despite a foundation
that has outlived Presidents.
A friend told me there isn’t a thought I haven’t thought
to death. He said: I ought to learn
that only books are bound to last.
But there is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to libraries
destroyed. Alexandria’s. Ashurbanipal’s. Where I live
is a mess filled with battered novels, sweaters abandoned
over every stool. My drunk roommate snores
from the auburn couch. My boyfriend’s toned arm reaches across
my mattress as though he needs me even in sleep. What a privilege
to have this entire library to lose. How lucky I am
to love what is flammable and fragile: paper, skin, cloth.
Dialectics
I notice what I didn’t before:
sweat forming on your back or the pitch
of your laugh. Where you like to be
touched and where you don’t. This is what’s offered
by the time we have now,
time I don’t know we’ll have again.
Hegel talked of the negation of the negation.
A truth’s challenge challenged
becomes something brand new. I am not
who I was when I met you. I wanted to talk ad nauseam
through what you hoped to abandon. We landed
on conversation that never ended, that danced
around facts—I mean, look at us laughing
hysterically in bed. Our bodies bend slightly:
a pair of parentheses trying to contain some aside,
something secondary to the point.
Kevin Hautigan lives in New York and has had poetry featured previously in The Common.