DOPPELGANGING


He took a cigarette and planted it
on his forehead right over the pineal gland said
this is where the third eye is it opens
easier near the water I know well
those for whom father and mother are curse words
from here you can see the frailness of all their houses
on the far shoreline

you and I we live under a wavering meteorite
the warp of physics brings us together in solitude
stink bugs twitching were his teeth
I can tell you where to bring hurt women
show them their loneliness a frog on a tinplate
we have the same scar on our sex
you'll mount me to disappear
we'll become a log or an orange-shelled beetle
what do bugs do when they're alone

I sat astride him and kept wrapping
the stems of daisies around his throat
his neck kept lengthening he gurgled
you can dig up an arrowhead or the keychain
from your father's car
press the diamond cave's entrance in my chest
his arms a linkage of mutated geese

I pushed him out in a slim kayak
wearing my life jacket thought he'd laugh
but it came from my lungs set the vest on fire
with my right hand set the passenger's rim alight
with gas from my left watched him drift without oars
toward the island where I
will swim for raspberries
when the water is clear of him

he'd twisted a plastic deck chair into the fork
of a tree when his heart popped like a seed
it unwound and steadied
the circles of its feet in the sand
but I sat in the tree instead