FROM ICARUS
Remember that time you came back
from wherever it was you were and you said you
were different, felt different,
that you realized we were simply three men
in two beds, readjusting the middle and playing both ends
against it, saying more, more… and all the problems
that come with that—
the door in the floor and the day by day, the presence
of a certain something in the room. Three men,
two beds—how they sleep in shifts,
soundly but with, perhaps, a certain disregard for protocol.
Four o’clock and Grant’s laughing. Five o’clock
and Henry’s getting angry.
Six o’clock and Calvin’s fingers find the spot
where the heart remembers pears.
RICHARD SIKEN is a poet and painter. His book Crush, selected by Louise Glück, won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Siken is a recipient of fellowships from Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Read more by Richard Siken:
Another poem in B O D Y
Two more poems in B O D Y
Buy Richard Siken’s latest collection I Do Know Some Things