The scent of the jasmine comes in heavy
as a past life. Like the one you left
after three and a half years in Houston. You’ve cracked
the window now so you can sleep
with a breeze. You could never
sleep with the windows open
in Texas, or you’d let
in the swamp by degrees: the muscadine’s
clusters of hard violet, the sunflowers
seared bald, socketed to the red
sides of the dried riverbed. Even the armadillos
tongued the cypress knees, foraging
like sleepwalkers. You often feel the swamp’s
hot marrow inside you as it grows
here in this dry Southern
California June, as it blooms
through your pillow. You feel the dragged
ghost of its humidity tapping
that code you can’t break. Those days
you’d wake in Houston, too late in the afternoon,
after daring the last night’s weather: You sipped
a heavy red on your front porch
instead of white. When you woke
a steep hangover tunneled,
deep as mirrors. Your sleep, years later,
in the West Coast, still builds shrines
to the stunted relics of Texan magnolias:
those blunt buds
the shriveled hands of martyrs
without a church. They’d thumb your half-
parted lips. What’s left
to worship? Not the summer
idling like a white pickup. Not the drunk
who hit the side of your apartment
on Ridgewood, took off with a limp
through the backlit oleanders. Not the oleanders
slick with blood the politicians
call illegal. What could you do to sleep
in Houston? You’d get up
from your insomnia,
from your then lover and walk
the neighborhood at night as automatic
sprinklers chirred and hissed,
slicked your arms. In the dark
evaporation you’d feel your cells
shimmer, your temperature drop
a degree, maybe two. Your body
just cool enough
to wade in, walk through.