After Role Model, “Sally When the Wine Runs Out”
I’ve been searching this room, while you sink
the mattress in snoring delirium, for the right words
to describe last night’s disco, how the club lights,
usually gaudy, tacky plastic became craft paper coronets
or fluorescent foo fighters crowning the winners of a teenage
bacchanal, the stoplights made aesthetic in thickened haze
while you used the asphalt to perform a crosswalk grapevine that
did soft things to my chest and kicked my feet into dancing shoes
I had forgotten I owned. The vintner I met in Napa last summer spent three hours
explaining wine maturation, how the wood stabilizes it into vibrance, richer aftertaste
and so now, I am imagining my studio apartment wrapped in your home-grown oak,
Daphne-and-Apollo-style. In this liminal space between poppy-rimmed eyes
and morning glory, I can imagine it all: like cabernet, you’ll get better with age,
red wine giving way to a softer mouthfeel. The cheap boxed wine will stay the same
except it’ll be kept in small fridges with controlled temperature settings
instead of makeshift garage coolers. You’ll smile around the rim of a glass.
This wine and this life and I will measure up to some standard of lover-boy
that will be good enough to confidently call your own.
When the morning shatters the windowpane in coils of diffused light,
drive your legs deeper into the linen lacework of bedsheets
Peel the hair from between your sauvignon-soaked lips
Tell me that you’ll stay forever