Poem for My Heater

_ The gas heater talks to me in my sleep. All evening I turn
the radio’s dials. It shivers, cracks, sputters, mad as my yen
but explicable. In California, we couldn’t afford true

heat in winter—only space heaters. Sometimes when the chill
grew unbearable I’d lift my dress and let the warmth leak
onto my knees. I kneeled there like a giraffe, the first impure

thought I ever had—heat, flushing the blood skywards
to my giddy head. The trouble with New York is that ice
doesn’t melt on limbs. Did I never warn you: my heart

is an ambulance driving through the snow? The heater’s ersatz
breath flares over my ears. I listen to its language until at night
I dream about my heater’s purr instead of the marvelous heat

of another body. Yours or never. Is it space or substance?
In these sad hours, we choose not to know. These days the light
falls dimmer so we forget supper, forget to write, miss

calls, miss all trains going westward, home. Sometimes I wake up
naked under a fur coat, sweating. Lover, I want to be indifferent
to heat. My own appalls me. I want to bury my hands like pigeons

in the snow. When the whole room brims and broils, it is one
wildfire eating another. Four nosebleeds stain the afternoon.
When I laugh, no one detects the awful trouble I’m in.

Tonight let’s waste the last of this fuel. You may hold me
responsible, but wait until tomorrow, darling, for the threat
of snow blindness. The frozen jukebox can’t play us a song.

When I am blind, every light seems bigger, rutilant in the glaring
snow. When it’s freezing, every lie seems true. Trapped inside
its delicate construction, a brazen igloo, a den of wolf-warmth.


--SALLY WEN MAO