On Placing Ships in Bottles
Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the opposite of that that is really life.
-Joyce, Ulysses
Last night, I dreamt that I read the last chapter of Ulysses
in its entirety while waiting for you to decide how you took
your coffee: heavy cream, no sugar, was the response,
designed, I believe, to make me think about the soft,
taught whiteness of your thighs.
In that same dream,
we spent an hour clinging to each other before a Warhol
diptych, painted in reds and greens before we went home
to the kitchen and you leaned over the counter, heels planted
firm, and swayed to distract me while I, bobby pin in hand,
glued the last bits of rigging to the mast and unfurled
cloth sails on a model ship in the relative vacuum of a bottle.
