I left him to it, the closest I wanted to get to the news was to start to sleep with him, slowly, while he was reading, the clouds of printed words gradually becoming bedsheets around us. When he left me, I thought, If only I had read the paper, and vowed, In two years, I will have the Times delivered, so here I am, leaning back on the couch, in the smell of ink’s oil, its molecules like chipped bits of ammonites suspended in shale, lead’s dust silvering me. I have a finger, now, in the pie— count me as a reader of the earth’s gossip. I weep to feel how I love to be like my guy. I taste what he tastes each morning without moving my lips. Maritime Some mornings, the hem of the forewash had been almost golden, alaskas and berings of foam pulled along the tensile casing. Often the surface was a ship’s grey, a destroyer’s, flecks of sun, jellies, sea stars, blood stars, men and women of war, weed Venus hair. A month a year, for thirty years. Nine hundred mornings, sometimes we could tell, from the beach, while taking our clothes off, how cold the water was, by looking at it—and then, at its icy touch, the nipples took their barnacle glitter, underwater a soft frigor bathed the sex as if drawing her detailed outline in the seeing brain, and he braced his knees in the press of the swell, and I dove under, and near the floor of this life I glided between his ankles, not knowing, until he was behind me, if I had got through without brushing him.
