that I humiliate him. It’s sex, and it isn’t—
whatever. For him, it’s a need, the way
brutality can seem for so long a likely
answer, that
it becomes the answer—
a kindness, even, and I have always
been kind, for which reason it goes
against my nature to do what he says, but
there’s little in nature that won’t, with
enough training, change…
After it’s done,
if the weather’s good, we tour his garden:
heliotrope, evening primrose … Proximity’s
one thing, he likes to say, penetration
another, and I have learned that’s true,
though which is better depends: whose life?
what story? the relief
of snowmelt,
or the flooded fields again? We go down
to the stables to visit the horses that,
when they were nothing, just shivering
foals still, he once asked me to give
names to. How long we’ve traveled,
he and I—more like
drifted, really—and
how far. More black than all the sorrows
and joys put together that I can remember
when I try remembering, which I mostly don’t,
now the foals,
they’re stallions. Call out
Fanfare, Adoration. Like broken kings,
they lower their heads, then raise them.
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