THE MARRIAGE BED IN SPRING PRINT

This morning, the birds—attentive students
of desire—reset their clocks; the pierced ray
of spring rewinds night and day, boils
melanin deep in the apothecary shop
of the brain. Not fully awake, desire claims me.
Remember those times you said it was okay?
We had sex the night my mother died;
years later, on a day I slept with someone else,
you and I fucked like rabbits. This morning
you hear me say it’s a celebration of life;
the South is young, it’s spring. But now,
as we lie in a colonial bed shaped like a sleigh,
its runners made of monkey wood, its coverlet
strewn with ashes, my self-regard is fractured
into pieces of slivered glass, and you say no.

Michael Salcman’s recent poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, Raritan, and New York Quarterly. His collections include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises), nominated for The Poets’ Prize in 2009 and a finalist for The Towson University Prize in Literature, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises), just out. He is a neurosurgeon and art critic in Baltimore.