Remember the long seconds — three
slow ones in all — before your face
that took an hour to apply turned grave
or the look you wore, sadder than any clown’s
in the rain, that was my cue to knit my brow
and continue fumbling with the three-sizes-too-small
hammer you handed me so I could once more fix
the swaybacked rocking horse we purchased
to ward off an unspoken future in which we
are continents apart, surrounded by our hungry
new families as we slice and dismantle
the same braised roast and lament how
we could have let hope stray, how the story
of our lives might have been different
if it had contained, however lame, something
we could have ridden into the sunset on.
PATIENT ZERO
Love is a worried, old heart
disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff
blues are made of, real blues
that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk
like the “Okra Blues” or “Payday Blues,”
though I think House would agree
two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues,
if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog
bitten in two by the neighbor’s dog, all of which
makes me wonder about the source of our disease
and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam
and Eve left the garden. Some have argued
that the first case of infection
could be traced to a carp or a stork, or maybe
even the hare, because God made them first, after all,
but the love lives of birds and fish,
even rough rabbit love, are more perfect
in their simplicity than we can ever hope to know
such do they dispense with the rituals
of courtship in short order
so much so we don’t really want to admit
the beasts and fowl and all manner of slithery thing
can truly love like us
so we label the heat of their hearts
and loins “affection” or “instinct”
or some trick of the lower brain and I think
if we are to be good scientists we must investigate
the moment when the sons of God made themselves
known to the daughters of men
before we turn up a singer strumming
a lute shaped like the goose egg
the singer’s mouth makes
every time she bends the long, mournful note
about how her angel traded his feathers
so he could walk in the skin of God’s prize creation
and in so doing became the first man she ever knew
who wasn’t full of shit
and yet was, because even though angels never eat,
her holy birdman always hemmed and hawed
when she asked point-blank
why it always took him so long to fetch a gallon
of moonlight or why he kept his wings
folded and why is it he wouldn’t crow
her name to the dawn unless the night
before she had said, Enough is enough, we’re done,
and her face had flooded and his
chest had burned cold
until the dark cracked and let a light creep through
to which he opened up and sang
in a tongue she didn’t understand but did
just enough to know their sickness
was something, and divine, and endless.
LOVE TRAIN
for D’Andra
My bowl brimming with pretzels,
the snack you wanted least,
I slid open the door of our sleeping car
where we had been enjoying the country rushing by,
as if we were the first two people
to look down into the valleys and see
bright necks of pines stretch across farms
and streams to the groves they once cradled.
You had asked for Earl Grey cookies
sandwiched around buttercream or marshmallows
made of chocolate, but all the tea bags had been dunked
and the chocolate melted over biscotti.
