My man’s voice, it’s a trumpet!
A lone gritty brass in a field of lunging grass and a dying fruit tree
and the thud of its last apple falling below the branches. The crisp bite, sour, and clunk as a swift hand tosses it into the current
of the stream out back, where the water warps over the greasy pebbles.
Or, say, that damn frog singing under my window at four, morning July
before the screen door slams shut from the gusts of summer rain.
And the wet bullets that pound upon the tin roof of the wood barn, that’s his trumpet.
“Come here boy! Come on in!” The dart of his mutt gliding through fierce droplets,
his paws thudding into muffled puddles, and that’s his trumpet.

And my man’s hands, they’re a map,
folded into my own like the puckered paper my father kept on the floor of his truck
before he left the world and his truck was sold.
Hands soft but starched and battered
with a thousand roads I trace and I clutch.
Maps that guide me through the dark.

My fingers glide upon the rocky cliff of his nose,
below his slippery slope jaw and atop his low brush meadow cheeks.
Up and around two furrowed unplowed brows,
and down beneath the burnt pleats that buckle under my man’s eyes,
how they swell and twist when he smiles.
And when he smiles!
The slope tilts, and the cliff shakes and the rocks nearly tumble into the bristles
of the parting fields below.
And my fingers hold on to keep this glorious world from collapsing.

In another glorious world,
my man might be the spectacular hue of a sky after snowfall
or the shine of a Gold Finch’s wing.
He might glisten like a shiny penny in a jar on an unreachable shelf,
like my father’s wedding band that twinkles on a chain
around my mother’s neck
when she digs for weeds in the garden.

And in that mysterious world perhaps
those chortles that burst from his belly with fiery exuberance
ignite into a flame, a joyous inferno
that explodes into a rain of my unknown sublime.

But to me, the colors of my man are crunched in a jar with that shiny penny
on an unreachable shelf.

One night,
when my hands are made of the delicate paper of my father’s map
when my knees ache from the wet bullets on the tin roof
and there’s no mutt to call in
when I, too, wear a wedding ring on a chain at the nape of my neck,
I’ll leave the stream and the fruit tree and the slamming screen door.
And in the dark, I’ll find my man
handing me a jar.