Plaster

I wake up and put my hand to the cool plaster
as if the wall could breathe the way I did
the years we lived together in the three room
tenement, summers the air so thick I grew
afraid to suck it in or to wake you with my
hammered breath. I touched the walls with my
hands; I touched the walls as if I could become
like them—dense with secret pock holes, tunnels,
the plaster half-alive—midnight,
3:00 a.m., the days your anger swelled the rooms
like blue damp, a flaking off your skin until I
invented errands—the onions from the Greek market,
the newspapers we could not live without, a
volume of Ronsard from the Book
Forum. I invented errands and stayed away as
long as I could. What did I do those hours not at
work? Sundays walking across the empty campus,
those marble stairs where I could sit and smoke,
and watch the striped silk trees flail in unseasonable
winds, the park by the river where a woman built
a kind of black boat of garbage cans and plastic bags,
peering out from the flaps of her dirty fake fur cap
with a sudden violent and animal cunning. But
night came and I went, always, home to you only to
wake afraid again, to place my palms one by one against
the walls, as if I were Atlas,
the rutted surface imprinting itself on my skin.