the kind of guy you wouldn’t want operating on you or heavy machinery,
he skinny-dips his gloveless thumbs
in the ebb and pulse of copy, stutters to the moat:
This won’t hurt a bit.
Meanwhile, languidly, with subtle difference, I
illuminate the consonants of coccyx on diagrams of the female pelvis in my turret with the bird’s-eye view,
just as Greta the Publicist, Dragoness-in-Chief,
interrogates the hair on our neck of the woods:
‘Seeing anyone these days, Robert?’
If I could split, I would – From the neck down, it’s all machine, claims a codger in a box on a dog-eared page. Siege ladder, I could footnote, brew a pot of black gold to the smoke point
and sip, and drip on her slingback shoe,
slug another gulp of my Hypocrite Oath:
creosote, no sugar.
THE SINGLE LIFE OF LAVA
Glory me, she likes my _____.
And even at this late age.
Another one, she likes my _____,
could come with me to the wine valleys
of the mid-century boogie
for a weekend away, laurels ablaze.
My lines grow more shameless with time,
I’m the proverbial bulldozer.
Tell me, do you come here
to bathe in pure Gewürztraminer,
and, days later, show the tub ring to your mother?
Mine’s buried three leagues upstream
from the one we’re in now.
You seem a little out of it too –
but by this age, let’s be honest,
we’ve both swallowed villages.
You’d think I’d stop apologizing
and level the field.
Sure, I agree it could never work anyway,
what with your absence of interest
in my bronto-thesaurus, the brass thumbtacks
of my private whirlpool.
The myth of our obsolescence is hardening.
There may not even be time enough
to fling rotini between the bucktoothed canyons,
melt lettuce to lace negligee,
and depart like racing slugs
from each other’s cracked lips.
And I just remembered my mortal fear
of addressing the opposite sex –
it has to do with my aversion
to upslopes, my latent acne of the soul.
I’ll be off now to my hole under the hill.
But if it’s any consolation, I’ll treasure
the might as well you seem to cough to your palm as I go. Seismographs will sense how I scorch all the way home on my own steam at the very idea.
NATURE MORTE
All breeze stalls mid-cough,
so the fumes of coffee
floss the room, and the plume
of Greta’s voice on the phone
steadies like a feather.
I know her voice is the shape of a wishbone
thanks to a third person
who lay still as grapes in a bowl
while intrepid physicians mapped
a diagram of chords
in what could have been anyone’s gorge.
SLIP-UPS
And Brian drops his full mug of coffee from a height:
Shit-whoops-damn! Hot white splinters in a stimulant tsunami.
But he doesn’t really mind –
his bending a chance to ogle Greta’s ankles,
scooting toward him like brooms.
She kneels to read the inkblots
on his jeans, while he gleans advice on their removal.
Everyone agrees it’s no big deal.
The incident bleeds into the ledger
of bloopers, office gossip,
which runs on tit-for-tat to infinity:
Last week Greta made out, as by accident,
with a pucker not her husband’s,
and Brian plucked a nylon string itch
with the publisher’s daughter.
(It was her funnel-shaped breasts.
Alcoves, we are meant to imagine,
like a lick of Manchego cheese.)
But something funny is happening to the puddle on the floor.
Like a dropped object returned to its pocket,
or a skunk turning to light at the spine as it streaks
across lawn, the dark liquid vanishes,
resets to an invisible web of tripwires throughout the room.
I keep very still, hold my place
like something nearly caught by spiders,
or like the would-be thief
of a large and opulent piece of art.
REVISION
