IT SEEMS RIGHT THAT SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS A POND CAN HOLD US BOTH

 

 

Menagerie

There is seam in this bottle

Straight as a cesarean scar
Where the two glass halves kiss
I would like to be constructed like that
Bound and connected to another thing so perfectly
Outside on the dock by the lake hatpin girls
In string bikinis absorb midday sun
Believing it will cure something
Camouflage or strip away certain sins
So boys will see them differently
I’d like to tell them not to be so foolish
That perfection is a manmade hoax
A menagerie in photo-shopped magazines
But then I shouldn’t even be looking their way
Men under twenty maybe yes
But not a derelict fifty year old like me
The sexiest thing close at hand is
This table littered with drained Coronas
And an ashtray without ash
Gleaming like a colorless eye
Empty but for a gold wedding band

 

Hand-painted

Someone left an infant on our lawn

Near the rose bushes my wife thought
Would make this shack look less tacky
Now the child eyes me unafraid
Though I must look like a redwood to it
Gurgle and coo, spittle spraying lips
It tries to tell me something
Its name or how it got here perhaps
My wife doesn’t think this is funny at all
“First you’re talking to yourself and now this?”
I clip off a few stems, find a vase in the house
My wife is nervous, so I tell her
“Geez!  I was only kidding.”
Outside the next day the child’s still there
I know it’s all in my head but
I give her a name anyway
The same one we’d chosen for our girl
Letters hand-painted on the wall
In an dusty room upstairs
Where no one ever goes

 

Seams

I keep looking for you in the seams

In the spring air flocked with cottonwood spurs
That look like bees dying from old age
I get it—you are not meant to be found
It’s called freedom for you, punishment for me
Juliet was only thirteen and Romeo two years older
You’d said, You don’t understand true love
Because you never had it with Mom
I look for you now on a bus in a train car
At the station at the food store
In a cathedral where I pray for the first time
Hoping forgiveness is not a hoax
And that this is only temporary
Like all the bee husks littered on the lawn

 

Note

Early morning five am

And I have to coax the sun out of hiding
There’s frost on everything
Even the blood-red oven coils
The coffee hisses catlike
And the furniture whispers behind my back
On the bathroom mirror is the note
You left in wide lipstick letters
Saying This time I really mean it

 

What Is True

Your lips are on mine

Tongues entwined
Like steamed goldfish
Swimming upstream
Toward warmer water
Where light explodes
Fireworks over a lake
Cliff edge dangling
The peak of an orgasm
As we both rise and writhe
And the moment takes pause for us
To catch our breath
Before being the first to speak
Saying only, “Yes.  Yes.
More please.”