Huma Rojo (2)

The beginning of the end
is not a moment but a song: tender notes
you know you've heard before, the sound
a lover makes in her throat
to answer some silly question you've posed—

and the end comes after it
like the explosions from far-away fireworks:
delayed, embittered, put out.

And though the lover has her cries—
the one for loving, the one for lonesomeness,
the cry that signals sleep will come, the cry
that coats the body in its low, warm vibration—
the end has no cry; the end

like a tire's slow leak comes with a hiss,
a delicate release that, unnoticed,
leaves lovers stranded
on the island of each-otherness, that foreign-tongue place

where maps are published inside-out,
where even the texture of the grass is wrong:
sharper, more like a lawn of tiny sticks
than a bed to shelter a stranger's back.