Different from other of my lives
but not so different because you
are a part of it and them and these

and this. We sleep because we love
to dream and I talk in my sleep, say
I love you with diligence, love

like porcupine needles are sharp—
that giant space porcupine
whose quills the Great Astronaut

plucked to weave the needlework
of the universe! is how I love you.
I’m incomprehensible in the evening.

God’s always an astronaut in my dreams.
We wake and are reborn,
I a little later than you and significantly taller.

Your breath is the best time of day.
We have the best ceiling asterisk
to footnote our bedroom life:

The frog wipes a little something
from his sad froggy face.
He sees there’s a backhoe in my heart

you pieced together like a ship in a bottle
in my sleep. He’s crying. No,
it’s raining. No, he thinks it’s raining

and the streetlight is climbing in
through the window like an incandescent
tangerine and flickers and dims,

and I present you with a flower
that smells like certain trees smell
in spring and blooms inside you.

 

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Joshua Diamond’s poems have appeared in Arsenic Lobster, National Poetry Review, Pleiades, and Verse Daily.

“Bedroom Life with Ceramic Frog” first appeared in TLR: The Lives of the Saints (Fall 2011)