Crabapples in the Century's Storm

You say that you've forgotten

But I know that you're rotten in your sweet little way

Like the crab apples, themselves like ornaments

Fermented in the suspense of their sweet decay

Drinking Shell Station wine

Beneath a sylvan lake willow

My prophesied Rebecca on my bike trail and pillow

I still see your cheeks so red in Pontiac summer

The pulverized sidewalk and the racing and the stupor

Or in danger, and the kids using a milk jug for a basketball

Risk it all to ask it all to bask a fall again in splendor

Tracing your rotten spine

Of little when your hair was still long

Everything a new song and the heater in the theater

Soiled tights

And the nights where we touched in standing darkness

The odor was magnetic and we wore it like a harness

My memory is freezing in your dead night winter attic

Evacuated all except for the electric static

Of our bodies sparking on the carpet and the mattress

Something made a tarpit out of what once was a fortress

Oh, but who can really say?

Maybe I took that for granted

But somehow my lips never left for the back of your neck slanted

Oh, my little wastrel, my sweet lost friend

My piss is in the tendrils of your rented house ivy

That ensnares the end

Suspended there with the crab apples, themselves like ornaments

That's what you said one morning

Looking out the back window of my parents'

One summer morning so fine

They're inside that book I gave you

Maybe there's a line you wrote to remind or to save you

Pretty boys sell shitty poise but mark down all their telling

Catchphrases that vaporize within ironic spelling

But now the crab apples are in the century's storm

The World Series is over and the world's collapsing in its form

I think of all those young names that day on the stones we read

And cold Arizona iced tea when the cemetery scorched us red

Now I am blind to your weekends

The snorting kind of your new friends

But there's a lot where Washtenaw ends that you might recall

I know the way your body bends in the park van, we're still in pens

The smoking frozen moment and the cataclysm of it all

I know your girlhood diary pens

I read it back to you with tenderness

Inside that summer bed across your mother's hall

Did I die inside the cleanse of blinding sunlight here on Lent?

We were perfect, that depends, it's all just sand and squall

Do you still hum when night descends?

I thought it was your calmest then

But it's your motor panic and the animals trapped in your wall

All the boys that you fucked over eventually got out of Ann Arbor

Well honey, how come you're still stuck behind the counter?

The streets we used to take, the cracking of the lake

I'll never get that final point you were barely even trying to make