Purification Tank

Tub like rising waters from the Great Awakening,
like sins slowly funneling into humanity’s ocean,
your density measured in hot submersion.

You do not float like Chagall’s lovers;
you are anchored to the tub together,
your bodies aligned like staggered
forks in a drawer, like fallen Stonehenge
rocks, one on top of the other.

Your staggered nude bodies in a pit
like two simple pieces of matter
in the great crucible of plagued history.

His legs stretch on both sides of you,
book soaking tiny drops of water
from your knees, you read.

“You do not do, you do not do
Anymore, black shoe”

As you read the words, you can feel
your bodies floating from the bottom
like little balloons. You float past Bella
and Orpheus alike. Words like wings,
you breathe in the comparable time
of your feminine desperation.

The world is so full of desperate girls.

You let him by invitation into your
purification tank where you loofah
sin-cleanse daily. This is your Grendel
layer, your sins written on the ceiling
like hieroglyphics.

This is how you will remember him,
after life, after death, staring at him
from your ether-built kite.

And all the while, he could not relate
to your tears, he could not understand
the power of the words thrown from
a net in a conceptual Heaven,
Plath running with your mother
through a sprinkler in the sunlight,
like ignorant innocent children.

“At age twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.”

He did not understand, but he listened.
That is all you can ask of him.
You ask him so often to join
you in your cleansing tank.
He is busy.

“There’s a stake in your fat black heart…
you bastard, I’m through.”