JED MYERS 

PROOF

Take last night—wasn’t much to it—

two earthlings floating our dreams       

in one bed. Though it left us

plenty of proof. Didn’t we shift

and touch under the dark’s one cover,

shuffle our sleeps together

in the gusts of each other’s breath,

then slip again deep

into singular drifts? I remember

your forehead against my neck, your arm

on my chest. . . . You kept

my knee a while between your thighs,

and I roused a little to the wind-

in-the-trees of your inhalations. No

more than this—all the proof

we’d need, to know, throughout

the rest of our lives, we had passed

love’s test. And why

doesn’t once convince us? As the night

lifted off to its dawn death,

it left us a certain scent—evidence

it had mixed our humors, stirred us

a oneness. Then the light scoured us

separate, our senses’

confluence lost. We showered

and dressed in our doubts—it suggests

we’d learned next to nothing.

Jed Myers lives in Seattle. He is the author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, forthcoming), and two chapbooks. Recent honors include the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, and The Tishman Review’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Recent poems can be found in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Natural Bridge, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Solstice, Canary, and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor for the journal Bracken.