Vacation Sex

We've been at it all summer, from the Canadian border
to the edge of Mexico, just barely keeping it American,
but doing okay just the same, in hotels under overpasses
or rooms outside ice machines, friends' fold-out couches,
in-laws' guest quarters-- wall paper and bedspreads festooned
with nautical rigging, tiny life rings and coiled tow ropes--

even one night in the car, the plush back seat not plush
enough, the door handle giving me an impromptu
and unprofessional frontal lobotomy, the underside
of the front seat strafing the perfect arches of his feet.
And one glorious night in a cabin tucked in the woods
where our crooning and whooping started the coyotes singing.

But the best was when we got home, our luggage
cuddled in the vestibule-- really just a hallway
but because we were home it seemed like a vestibule--
and we threw off our vestments, which were really
just our clothes, but they seemed like garments, like raiment,
like habits, because we felt sorely religious, dropping them

one by one on the stairs: white shirts, black bra, blue jeans,
red socks, then stood naked in our own bedroom, our bed
with its drab spread, our pillows that smelled like us,
a little shampoo-y, maybe a little like myrrh, the gooseberry
candle that we light sometimes when we're in the mood
for mood, our own music and books and cap off the toothpaste

and cat on the window seat. Our window looks on
a parking lot-- a dental group--and at night we can hear
the cars whisper past the 24-hour Albertson's
where the homeless couple buys their bag of wine before they walk
across the street to sit on the dentist's bench under a tree
and swap it and guzzle it and argue loudly, until we all fall asleep.

* Dorianne Laux is the author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990), introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke (2000). She is also co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in fall of 2005.