IN BED WITH THE RADIO

You’d turned against me. There’s safety in knowing, I thought.
Like lying in bed with the radio, listening to the war;
cocooning ourselves in the brutality across the border.

Trying to dodge history
– bloodied, lashing out to protect its young –
we played dead as best we could.
Lie still, don’t make a sound; maybe it’ll leave you be.

I’ve had nosebleeds for years, I said,
and look how even now the blood comes in bursts,
like this crackling transmission
from some Bosnian partisan’s radio.

*

THE ONE I SHOULD BE TELLING

Cold as cold cream you were
that’s what I remember of that summer.
retreating into shadow of your words,
like crawling under the boughs of a tree.

The slight change in pressure
that makes a breath a sigh
and the troubles in your breast
rattling like rusty cans.

Sometimes, I mistake you for your memory.
To touch you now,
I must reach across the mirror of remembering.

You were, back then,
the one I should be telling now.