Puritan (Awake)

It's cold. Winter. Thin light. In this upper room,
Walls like a stiff collar or cuff or cap. Somewhere
Far from here, a deer grows still in a white field.
Someone looks up, ghost in the window.

Here, sad morning starlight trembles on the floor.
A moment of headlights, clothes here and there,
Their bodies sleep, a snowplow, dark tender animal,
Effaces the streets.
Is it wrong to worship

The precise curve of the bone that cradles an eye?
The finer bonework of a wrist?
World that is not you grows tedious

From the base of me, the odd joints, starry map
Of arteries, veins, ribs, and the lungs.
They keep, wild heart—various untetherings.
An overall coming loose.
Now, waking, I know what distance is like:

Me. I have attended to the bones of your shoulders,
How they cross one another, fit together,
Delicate, like bones of a bird, celestial—an x-ray.
You occlusion of distance.
I recall in this half light a time
At once too far and too close.

Where are you? Where your hands might part me
The way a child handles an orange,
Carefully parting segment from segment.
Does starlight tremble in the pale ellipse of a body,
Or in the white disaster of sheets? If not starlight, then what?
Somewhere, I know it, the deer goes from stillness to flight.
Sun comes up. That person in the window knows herself again
And again.