Requiem

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Stebbins, Ethan

"I could do it," she says in monotone,

"but I also couldn't." After a weighted interval

inside of which the tenants above us

keep slamming their bed or couch or table

or whatever they do it on against the wall,

making a kind of impassioned metronome

of our ceiling, I concur with a tired murmur

and shift my leg from the heat of her thighs,

trying to ignore the crude, endless crescendo.

We are sober anyway, and she's got this throat

and chest and sinus thing and keeps breaking

into involuntary convulsions of gluey coughs,

getting up every ten minutes to make

dying sounds at the sink and hack the shit out.

Gradually, the animal-ululations die off;

the screech and the slam ceases. So we lie

in the wake of that great symphony, of all their

flesh-grappling abundances, in, that is,

the silence of completion, they having finished,

or simply died of fulfillment, she having returned

from her latest purging, and we too

are silent, lying there beside the prospects

of one another's bared bodies, my thumb

making barely audible lisps where I move it,

just barely, back and forth across her back

as we drift off to its meter, its dying music,

thinking of all the sad concerts of the flesh.