Breath

by Ken Haas

One oven of a night in Fiji,
our bathing suits getting wetter hanging out to dry,
I dreamed peeling off my skin.
Instead, once an hour, I tiptoed back and forth
along the foot of the bed to change sides,
because her body had rolled over again
and I wanted to stay in its breath,
cool on my face and chest,
the grace she cast even while sleeping,
charged with the still-spiced atoms of a world
she had walked blithe and barefoot—
Wisconsin, Argentina, the Islands, the Bay.

With our return to the mainland came the tumors
and the science that said burn her inside out,
so the body I knew took the form of
those beings who wafted off the spaceship
at the end of the Spielberg film,
gaunt, hairless, bearing nothing but light
and the tones they had placed in our minds,
hands opened upward as if to say
put your troubles here.

Oh yes, there are souls like this among us.
Let me sleep in the last gasps of the rogue cells
that have come to steal her,
the dark shapes that resemble me without her,
the strays now being roasted to smoke.
Let me wake to a breath that has retaken its country
and drink deeply the air of why I am here,
with the mango, the gold dust,
the tango, the snow.