Three Poems
APRIL, PARIS
Nothing would be less shall we call it what it is, a cliché
than April in Paris. But this poem got started with some
thing I don’t think I could do but it reminded me of
Aprils and then three magazines came with Paris
on the cover. Sometimes I’m amazed at all the places
I’m not, lets say Paris since actually it’s only March
but in the magazines they are at outdoor cafes which
must be quite chilly now. And I forgot the cigarette
smoke, until I see many in the photographs are holding
what I’m sure isn’t a pen. I wondered how they can
always be eating, biting and licking something sweet
and still have the most gorgeous bodies. I wonder too
how my friend, once an actress, so maybe that’s a
clue, could dress up in scanty, naughty, as she puts it
clothes for her husband while I am sitting here in
baggy jeans and torn sweatshirts. I’m wondering if it’s
because he’s lost his job and she is trying to cheer him up.
I began thinking of Paris when she described the umbrella
she decorated with drops of rain, how she just wore
a garter belt under it. I thought of tear shaped drops of
rain I made for the Junior Prom’s April in Paris,
long before I felt the wind thru my hair on Pont Neuf.
It’s there in the photograph which I hope is more
original than the idea of the photograph because
I plan to use it on my next book. I wish I could feel
what she must, dolled up, trying to soothe this
man and getting off on it. As for me, only
imagining you, the one with fingers on me,
holding me on the page of a book
could make me as excited
LEMON WIND
all day
nobody wanted
to talk
the sleeping bags
were still wet
from the storm
in Cholla Vista
Nothing went right.
But later the
wood we
burned had a sweet
unfamiliar smell
and all night
we could taste
lemons in the wind
IN SPITE OF HIS DANGLING PRONOUN
He was really her favorite
student, dark and just
back from the army with
hot olive eyes, telling her of
bars and the first
time he got a piece of
ass in Greece or was it
Italy and drunk on some strange
wine and she thought
in spite of his dangling
pronoun (being twenty four and
never screwed but in her
soft nougat thighs) that he
would be a
lovely experience.
So she shaved her legs up high
and when he came
talking of foot notes she
locked him tight in her
snug black file cabinet where
she fed him twice a day and
hardly anyone noticed
how they lived among bluebooks
in the windowless office
rarely coming up for sun or the
change in his pronoun. Or the
rusty creaking chair
or that many years later
they were still going to town in
novels she never had time to finish
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