March 28, 2004
I was a balcony, straight, rigid and overarchingly proud, surprised
but pleased to see you waiting in line below
queued to ask your erudite question (impatiently, I know
but seeming otherwise because of your reluctant breeding), while waiting
three paces back from the woman at the mike who is not asking a question at all
but effusing over her own interesting question-to-come preamble. You stand soft,
contraposto, like a mean virgin from a good family, arms imprisoning your festival
booklet, pressing it into your diminished breasts. I see your mouth and remember.
I was an announcing angel circling uneasy, flying a nervous, jerky, dangerous long
approach to land within your well used heart,
waiting my turn to glide down and impart
a wonderful secret need you'd kill not to hear, deliberately will not endure.
The air between us is thick, a gooey, slippery, guilty mess
though I could imagine climbing down with care, a representative former lover
who parted so permanently yet remembers naked arms pale and thin,
weak-seeming but packed with muscular resolve.
I was a pot, a bowl, an empty grail feeling unholy, waiting for my discoverer.
I was helpless, like a wet leaf stuck to summer's sucking cement
where even a strong wind, a hurricane specifically sent
to pull me away and set me free failed miserably. Your kryptonite hair did me in,
hair so feminine and so powerfully literate made me crack and warp,
hair filled with twisted scripts decipherable only to current loves. And the rest of you--
oh, I remember touring your academic-chaired figure, small bosomed, but motherly hipped...and I die!