In the White Noise of the Evening
after Louise Glück

Forget me if I say I’ll leave you: the bashful
and never-spoken-to-again are always
riven by static. I cannot prove
what I can’t believe, while you discourse of
virtue as if it meant something: you haunt me like the open sea,
never a sane thing in a sane face.
Oh, you were ever lady finger, consonant, laying down
a pale second in the morning beside the nightstand,
and the day before, commanding in the tea box. You couldn’t see
us as less used to it, this chatter that inhibits risk
of becoming anything, the Price Club and the Money Tree,
the salt-free chip and thin gravy – were you right to deny
that I could resist? This is
how I cruel you to thought, with this refrain
in the white noise of the evening,
in the creaking ever rocking your chair, the latch
now lifting at the gate.