REGINALD SHEPHERD
Doppelganger Music
Must I again wake from dreams of March storms
to see you walking through the window
from the night that loves you, from the March
storm you bring in with you, that takes your shape
in hollow sheets, molds them with your vagabond
hands, cold and unstained by ragged rain?
Loose pages swim the room like wet leaves.
Could you close the cold outside
the way you close storm-colored eyes, leave
wind alone to drive the nearest branches
against dripping glass, scrawling
transparent obscenities? Come to bed. Instead you
read out loud, Yeats—for a moment that's
the libel the wind is scribbling, and as usual
I don't understand. Clouds paint the pane
with splattered rain, the scrape of naked branches
drawn on glass drowns out your voice. Tick
tick. Your body ebbs away beside me
into a private night; I try to trace out
wanderings across your back. Streetlights
seep through the blinds at five, or six by now,
muddied daybreak clambers like an animal
over the sill, splays itself across the window
shamelessly. Tick tick. Pulled down at last
into my own private sea, I wake at noon
to sheets keeping your shape again, restless
pages weighted with a window
closed to the wind still talking
to itself (still incomplete, filled with lapses, empty
phrases), damp branches ticking off the minutes
to which raddled leaves spill in time, you
wandering your nowhere once more. 
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