The person gazing at this page before you had really amazing eyes—
blue the way the Caribbean is blue that first minute off the plane

to someone who grew up in Jersey. Anyway, it’s good you’re here.
The truth is I’ve been lonely, crawling up and down the page at night.

Life is like this boomerang: you get hurled out, and everything
is fresh, then you hit forty, start to arc back to the hand

that flung you from the womb, the Lord’s hand, and then
it’s all rerun. I know I’m complaining, and that it’s unattractive,

but please, forgive me, because complaining is like sex for old people.
Have you ever cringed with your whole body? Been so filled with shame

you wanted to wriggle out of your flesh, like a serpent in a forest,
like the snake that betrayed Eve? No one ever mentions

how the snake apologized, how he tried to make it up to them,
how the Lord punished the snake too, said I will fill your kind

with so much shame and self-hatred you will writhe out of yourself
every six months, just like a man’s penis. It’s true—twice a year

men wake and find nothing in their boxers, but the empty casings
of their runaway fallacies. Anyway, 1875, a Civil War vet from Virginia

gets off a boat in England. Everyone calls him Yankee. He cringes, snarls
I ain’t no Yankee, I killed Yankees, but after a month he begins to take it,

the way we all begin to take the gray hairs in our underpants, the ring
of our anus loosening, our rocket ship struggling to pierce

the atmosphere. Now, if you would just lean forward a little, friend,
and drag your fragrant strands over my voluptuous grief.