The Better Higher Power

Our sober months feel like strangers

that snuck in, turned on the TV

then died on the couch

where so many nights, I stared at the ceiling.

It’s my wife who breaks the spell,

calling from wherever she lives to say

we should hit a meeting together,

so we do, and find ourselves in a rain shelter

waiting on a bus to take us from the church

with its nests of pigeons,

stuffed into the louvered openings of the bell tower,

so much like the snarls

jutting from the nose of the man who led today’s group.

A damaged liver is what he’s got

and one more day off the wagon

might shut him down for good.

He holds the bloated barrel of his gut

I put a hand on mine,

and watch Cass press a palm to hers.

Now, meeting adjourned,

the bus, riding us away,

a ribbon of her lemon colored bra slips

from her shoulder.

I guess we’ve both shrunk, lost weight,

maybe measurable in cans, a twelve pack for me.

No doubt, she is looking good.

I want to ask if she is working

but not if other men are touching her,

only how we might find a darkness of our own

lace ourselves together to be more

than two persons who have just rattled off a Lord’s Prayer

and can not say trespasses without a hiss

or temptation without want.

Has me thinking how words like pigeons

mate for life but maybe

can’t stand to be together, forever and ever—

Dirt to bag, bench seat to bedsheets to a room in a house

where we arrive nervous,

two someones feeling stripped

without drinks anymore, her dresser, her couch and bed

and new lemon bra

where the thick tendons of my fingers

keep fumbling the clasp

as I bend one side to the other

for the matter of her skin

to contact the antimatter of mine

if only to explode

which seems a straightforward step in recovery.

As bra is to clasp,

shoulders are to blades

lemon is sour to sweet

to a harness that holds

So I ask, since she is laughing at me,

which is the better higher power

for unhitching these things

because I can’t seem to go it alone.

I find my new-self wishing for my old-self,

whose steady drunk hands

fizzy with happiness

would snap that thing free of her in a heartbeat

and with it, might also go the who from who I am—

sober, praying backwards

into temptation.

But it’s she who twists

one arm to her spine,

and undoes herself for me—

the stranger on her couch

willing to die here or just sleep for weeks

beside the empty cups of her lemon bra.