Brokeback Mountain



Brokeback Mountain (2005)

“queer cupids of all persons getting up”
—Elizabeth Bishop, Love Lies Sleeping

So like the threadbare shirt, it isn’t hanging there in the closet anymore, in my dumpy trailer, out in the Wyoming sticks, and the movie doesn’t end, with me standing there in the bedroom, looking out the blank empty window at nothing, divorced, living alone, my daughter getting married, instead the hangover moon is overhead, the cinder stars crossing the dark mountain sky, there’s not enough daylight to get up yet, so we stay in our sleeping bags, zipped-up together to keep warm, there’s a neon tilt to the quarter moon, as Brokeback carefully reveals itself once again, delicately with all-male workmanship, detail upon detail, cornices in the granite facades, the mountain reaching up languidly, into the pale blue morning sky, slowly becoming what it was yesterday, and the day before that, the death in sleep with him next to me, the feel of short hairs bristling on our necks, some smoke still drifting down from the fire, past the shirt on the clothesline, time to get up but the light-dry smell of his hair, the queer cupids waking up & regrouping in the iron cliffs, but I drag out the business affectionately, scourged by roses light as helium, that’s how mornings happen up there, when you’ve fallen over the edge of the world, when your face is turned away from the city, and you just lie there breathing easy, nothing distorted or invented, I mean just lying there next to him, waiting for him to open his eyes, and smile at me, when morning comes.










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