Poetry

What’s a song without measure,
Or a verse without meter,
Company without pleasure,

Picasso the matelot, his Colt cocked,
Amiably inert in the photo
From Houston’s museum studio,

A woman
downwind from Nagasaki now dying
is forced to decide

The last time you were beside me
it was April.
I knew it was over

In flight: bird, arrow, grief.
Static: a red chair
waiting for someone in a patch of sun

Tonight I walk out into winter’s fingers
stepping from one stone

Waiting in a lofty hotel lobby
honeycombed with entrances and exits,
feeling weak, I find a corner, lean

Yes, there were “close-ups.” In a marriage like theirs,
there were many, and each was easy to find
(her lovely face, her smiles, her pensive stares)

He never even noticed anymore
the “finish” of the wine, the tang of the salt,
the sweetness of the sugared petit four,

It’s a farm town in the August heat
With a couple of bars along Main Street.
A jukebox moans from an open door