Wedding Gift
When it was enough we started back,
sand on the floorboards, sand in our hair,
the smell of salt everywhere, our skin
stung with spray, our sun-dazzled eyes
soothed by the green of the drugged river,
the walls of purple flowers twenty feet in the air,
for miles at a time, swinging their red flowers
like bells, fairy testicles vibrating in the coastal wind.
When it was enough, we piled the empty bottles
and blankets in the wicker basket,
nestled in the car trunk amid the seaweed
and shells, kept the last bottle of champagne
to open on the drive home, when the sun had
fallen and the headlights burned their way
through the gathering fog that would hide us,
shepherd our return to the city.
When it was enough we took off our clothes
for one last swim, out past the buoy
marking the Condesa Milamor’s shipwreck,
out to the rock submerged just below the waves,
where we could plant our feet and embrace
as though floating, where you could touch me
so deep and offer me all this ocean as a wedding gift.
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Chauvinist Pig
Skimming monocled and swift
over the first draft of her sad complaint
eye saw disruption and mind braked, a moment later.
The passage in question read: ‘he was
the sort of jerk who wouldn’t bother
telling you if the condom broke’.
For ‘condom’ the eye had substituted ‘boredom’,
fatigue overreading her furious aside.
The meaning didn’t seem to alter
with this modification, although
the implications (for her, the protagonist
of the dead-end fictional affair)
were far more serious, yes, far more serious.
He was the sort of jerk who would decide
against telling her and would read on
with his lazy eye, furtive for landmarks in a
foreign land.
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Nucleus Of Desire
Of desire, of things desired.
The decision to discard reason,
to dive from the blue-shingled roof
on wings stitched together out of
blurred dreams and dashed hopes.
Such uncommon sense in the nothings
we yearn for: the affair like a tempest ;
the scene in the hotel lobby ;
the break-up postcard ;
the regrets, which were fewer
than we imagined, linked like
charms on a bracelet dropped
from the bridge at dawn,
without a single witness
to our melodramatic heartbreak.
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Countdown
It begins with a Buddhist monk,
burning alive on a crowded street,
and ends with a fade-away of
Scandinavian countryside.
The split-screen, and then the
fusion of faces stays, shivering,
in the memory.
Am I the great cruel actress,
horrified and cold?
Or am I the pretty caretaker,
nursing the stop/start recollection
of spontaneous sex?
I am reminded, re-mind-ed,
and know well the gestures
I cringe away from when I
see how others employ them.
Bourgeois, yes, and Woman, yes,
with a heart red as a furnace,
a cauldron of rebellion exhausted,
the simmer which will tip over in
flames across the white stove,
starting at four, three, two, one, now.
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The Lovers
It was at the reception after your cousin’s wedding,
as we sat slowly getting drunk on sweet wines
and the prospect of no responsibilities for three days.
You pointed out your grandparents,
seated on the other side of the dance floor.
Funny, you said, they’ve been old my entire life.
I looked at them, catching glimpses through the
pass and whirl of the dancers.
He, cupping his ear to a comment from his
grinning neighbor, and she, smiling at
the flower children goofing off in the middle
of the dance floor, or smiling perhaps to herself.
And then I saw that they were holding hands,
his on top of hers, their fingers enlaced,
and I could see them younger than we are now,
the lovers who had survived.