Thursday, September 28, 2017

to the girl sitting alone at the wedding last night


i.

to the girl sitting alone
at the wedding last night with
your gloomy lover:

i saw you twice
for hours as you
looked at the idling
table cloth adorned
with the ornaments of convention
and he didn't ever talk to you

you wore a dress that you
picked out for hours and
you made your hair a
canvas to Eros
and he didn't ever stroke your arm

you watched the bride
escort her groom across
a universe of polished barn
boards while you bit your lip
and he didn't ever whisper in your ear

you were ambushed
again weren't you?
by some bitter circumcision
of his irony; how he sat
with his back to you,
regarding his knuckles

your makeup was
ill-made while you dreamt
into your mirror how this was
the night he would finally plant stars
in your pouch, penetrate your
heart with a ferocious lightning
bolt

you've wasted hours wishing
him into your ripening loins;
hours of sleep enchanted by a
shimmering phantom only to wake
dry to the kiss of the wind

yours is a fugitive story
carried on the tongues of all
the inaugurated women who
ladled their dreams into buckets
of mud

only to see their coins
converted into stones
and skipped out to sea by
men made of ash and silt

i've wondered for ages
why some fields go to
harvest and some to seed;
their flowers felled and
best days sent down unspent

i would tell you
that you need nothing
but to jump into the
wheeling expanse
alone

that you flutter those
slender fingers across the
petals of collapsing daisies
alone

that you captain your
vessel, stand naked on the
prow, breathless,
alone

that you prick your
dreams with the point
of a pen in order to bleed
the air from the line
alone

that you pray for the
arrival of the triumphal
flood within you and not
the captive famine of another
alone

i suspect that you
won't, but instead will
sit at the reception with
your hands in your lap
looking across that long
way down while he
broods

ii.

there was a girl
in high school who
ached for love to the
point of distraction

she was not unattractive,
as i recall, but her
constant vigil at the door
of desperation ruined her face

how much she clawed at
possession! to be absorbed
by the skin of a boy!

i observed this in my cold
corner, alone, watched her
check her reflection in the
mirror of the windows when
a boy entered the room

she did no checking
when i said hello but
she did laugh at my jokes
and i soon became
her confidant

telling me how ____
kissed her at the football
game but has a girlfriend
(so be discreet)

how she let ____
change the oil in her mom's
car sunday afternoon
because (that's the sort
of thing i won't ever need
to know how to do, not with
a good man)

how she let ____
put his hands in certain places
even though they really just met
but don't worry it won't go further
(her mom got pregnant at 15
with her, don't forget!)

her mother was oily and
indifferent, blowing smoke
and barking orders from her
car whenever she had to pick up
my friend from school

her father lived in another
town - or another state - either
way he was really only
geography to her at that point

whenever i made her laugh
her poverty became a refugee
and i saw the real armies of
her cloudy battlefield withdraw

but then ____ would
come by and she would
stop laughing to check her
reflection and tell me he's
the kind of guy that will make
sure she doesn't live as alone
as her mother some day

she did not solicit from me
a kiss; ask me to change the oil
in her mother's car on a sunday;
allow me to touch her in places.
i was a brushstroke on a black
canvas

i believe i loved her
or would have, but out of
some overladen pity or
misplaced esteem

i dreamt about her laughing
teeth and the toffee smell of her
hair and how i could just mount
a rescue one of these days

but never did and
instead remained a witness
to her expenditure of time
flitting from flower to flower
and watched how she allowed herself
to be caught under bell jars
over and over

i ran into her at a store recently
and noticed her pearl was gone; her
fragrance evaporated, how her
hands and soul were as dislocated as
her mother's

i learned that she suffocated
eventually under the weight of
a collapsed marriage to a man
who was sulfuric and who had
moved to another town,
or another state, either way -

she'd bought her first car
and found an apartment
and her kids visited when they
needed money or a babysitter

how she takes her car to the
local garage to have the oil
changed because she doesn't
mind the man there who
flirts with her

i would know him,
his name is ____, we went
to school, remember? and
he's talking about moving
in

not now, she insisted:
she's too tired to need

then she laughed at her
own joke and we said our
good-to-see-you's
and then she departed
into her new glorious exile

iii.

my daughters, stay beneath the shading trees
that hide you from the mouths of captive minds
resist the urge to dive upon their seas
or set your sails to points of distant finds

deny a quarter to the ones whose want
would have you tossed upon their ashen sands
and make of you a shallow, idle haunt
stripped down to bleeding eyes and feeble hands

crave not a love, let love be love alone
have not your truth be leaked beneath your soul
stay not inside the mind that's not your own
let not another's dream become your toll

my daughters, toss your souls upon the air
and watch convention's shackles all laid bare

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