Laid down so long. Lay down
on the floor, on the floor, on the floor, your
leprosy, where all your friends and all your faults
are all received. The muscles in my arms and legs are
growing long, but not as fast and not as strong as all the
hearts on cards pumped out for the people:

Valentine’s Day babe, disease receipt stapled
to the card, through the heart, my skin is
an able thing to stretch across the floor,
walk all over me
Katherine.

If not a transplant, you needed something new.
The doctors were patient, how patience could move in you,
and make your chest listen, this Valentine’s Day,
a card and corpse opened: you opened your shirt,
and lifted my heart away. You opened your shirt
and lifted my heart away.

We parted, me with a stitch in my wrist,
you with a gaping hole in your Hallmark,
so lifting the card to your lips, you say

“you opened your shirt and lifted my heart away,”
then added the heart to the punched card,
and had a widower deliver it to our street.
Your sympathies and doctor’s fees with it,
saying this is your disease receipt.

Say
you’re relieved to have it out in the open
your heart’s on your sleeve and what’s more,
in weight, you are a songbird but all they say
is take her to the floor with the other girls dancing
but I will stay, I will stay. I cannot break it off,
no I will not love you.

Another man mentioned was your breakout,
what you started to say when I started to shout
sour in your mouth babe,
sour my name.

Lovely and timid.
Oh babe, your heart’s about to break.

Praise him for healing
if your heart’s about to break.

Hands up for healing.
the rabbit and the snake.

Just stare into the ceiling.
Lay your hands across your face.

You and me,
we go at it until sweat
collects under your breasts “mad sex,”
“gotta have it.” I draw my hand
across your throat,

Son of Man, open the apple.
The maple has been irresponsible,
dropping its robins like sperm—
we bent over birds, their beating red breasts
in our woods as they were dying

as if their deliverers,
their wet nurses. I abandoned two
human infants on the place where a bird was
where you found them, and thought of you
as that first nurse— and so
you were a girl who nursed wolves.

I open my shirt,
so you may admire my moles,
lay your finger on my chest,
over the place where the heart is,
while I carve a heart in the bark of a sycamore

and your finger uncovers a porous,
ventricled, warm lump of ore the size of a fist while
a widower, senex iratus, stands
on your porch holding a valentine,
I throw my hair back at the hips and

suckle at the globe’s canopy, which
descends like a sheet where stars weight it.

So have I said it all or should I say again,
you were laid down so long,
now you’re married to an engine.

You are married to your chest’s new fruit,
you are married to an engine,

you are married to a man’s most absolute invention.
The false heart's in your body

the real one’s in your name:
you are married to an engine,

you will be widow to the same.
For even as your heart stopped honey,
and as you were revived again

I danced on the floor, thinking it your grave,
thinking I was a widower.