Curtain Lecture Reversal

Chloe, your eyelids clenched under the pillow’s marital undress rehearsal,
And your right cheek, like an orchid, blushed if I said a bad word.
Relive your plot to reveal we were quits over a twist-off bottle
Of muscatel, then, keeping chattel and cats, turn away, once more, to screw.
Listing my offenses and your love for Professor X. in an ex post facto dispatch,
You gave that Father of Four two more before his clenched heart failed.

Night of the skunk attacking ducks; morning, our match an old wives’ betrayal
Parked in a nightstand drawer. For what I stole before we met, this terse
Address: through that crowd our eyes locked; our divorce, a shoestring catch.
Lastly, does your mom’s it’ll all come out in the wash refrain still seem absurd?
Deb in a ’69-Chevy-knees-tucked-into a bucket-seat-July-fifth debut:
In a disarray of arms we kissed. Suck my blood, you blurted.

Note the interior light above the marriage of our freckled constellations as skin bristled
At the light breeze over the pond. You undid a chartreuse tie-dyed affair. I inhaled:
Every electric window your portrait; that clawed scar beneath your eye a crescent moon.
Note the years, my rictal vis à vis turning rage into a hurled cereal box’s free verse.
Exhume your 2 a.m. I hate your guts declaration hissed to the dark that spurred
My getaway. Putting up with occasional sex: play me like a cello, you’d recite detached.

You cut my hair before I fled, not my throat. The so there and so long of our mismatch.
Elise, I—goatdrunk, but still finifugaling with Deb—chased you full throttle.
Love, a loose meat sandwich, held until your lust dubbed me Summer Bird.
Lust, a hot chick on a stick, fell apart. Me too. Fidelity to a bedswerving draggle-tail
Ewe shepherded me to divorce court numéro trois where I couldn’t forgive the unforgivable.
Now, while you fard with concealer, we shmooze about our offspring. Time scoots

By voilà: you, divorced again, and I, wed-winds that blew
Out the padlocked window between us. Your canine houseful, my murder of cats,
Those calls when you’re upset, and hell-bent hikes over woodland trails led to a reappraisal.
How long dear friend since we weren’t speaking, in litigation, or hostile?
Kefira—from an Island-off-British-Columbia phone booth—you assailed
All my long distance dancing around your questions as weasel words.

That you leapt a continent, ditched a robust life to join my theater of the absurd,
Endured this frostbitten heart, enemy’s stratagems, or kids’ ill will, is no ballyhoo.
Remember Bingham Falls, your serenade? Surprise nightingale
Above moonlit roots and water pounding rocks—my grasp of beauty had to start from scratch.
Desire married twice grew under the red-tailed hawk that flew over our carousal
I—bearded gobemouche beguiled—believed would heal the world as we submersed.

Another walk in the dark: trespassing a Florida golf course, wood stork asleep on one leg,
Nonpareil meteor shower, your arms fugling in the humid air. Let’s leave
These failed espousals and extinct words dispatched in a dreamed-up bottle. God, I love you.