Love Poem # 46

~ For Miranda

We are like Méliès,

that artist of the silent film
who died poor --
the fate of all who pursue

something out of love.

Face it. 

We make a handsome, 
paranoid couple

sleepwalking backwards 
hand-in-hand in 

the midst of plots 
and sheer drops.

We back our way into tomorrow,

looking down but leaning
both shoulders against a filthy wind.

We back our way
into a flotsam of broken voices,

the detritus of arguments

we never saw coming.

The Girl Who Bought My Bibles

Since she was seventeen,
she wakes early to watch
the gray-frost morning
yield to the day landscape.

She adores the way night
fights a graceful retreat
from the penumbra
of every pine shadow.

She can play them, too,
these branches waving
a canopy of shade.

This is her song.

She shunned this dog
since she was seventeen and singing:
 I'll be damned if I dance
and I'll be damned if I don't.

She dreamed this scene
for the rest of her life.

Dancing with the last cold
breath of last night,

she was seventeen and singing:

The day is broke.
Be wary; look about.

Then, window, 
let day in
and let life out.

Camp Life

Before First Battle:
First thing in the morning
is drill, then drill, then drill again.
Between drills, we drill
and sometimes we stop
to eat a little and have a roll call.

Before Last Battle:
After breakfast there is little
for the well men to do in these
winter quarters. The forenoon
is spent in poke, poke, poking around
till the appetite says
it is dinner time.

When Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow Woke in Bienville Parish, May 23, 1934

Bonnie said:

We forswear salted horse

and the hard take

and the random thrill

kill. Our nature is raw.

We hate all law, 

stool pigeons,

spotters and rats. 

Clyde said: 

My lover, ignore the riotous 

affairs of this raffish, 

faith-based sunrise.

Such a dawn has only one 

remedy for all that ails us--

a thread-precious death. 

Bonnie said:

We forswear the first

and final word we heard

about the kidnap demand,

the Kansas City Depot job,

and clinically proven 

hair-loss solutions. 

Clyde said: 

Say goodbye, my darling, 

to the bald apostle 

who pawned his soul

for a pair of soiled wings. 

Bonnie said:

We forswear songs we forgot

we wrote in my mother's bible.

We forswear bus-station farewells

and a journey that takes us down

a gunpowder road

where day waits in the cane brake. 

Clyde said: 

Abandon, my heart,

the art of letting go.

Let's ride our horses

toward all the towns

we plan to name our children.

Waking Upside Down Under Water

He dreamed 
he was waiting in line
at the Department of Motor Vehicles,

standing in a row of cardboard eunuchs.

They were holding hands like a 
paper-chain of faceless children, 

and they were singing: 
Please cut us out

just as fast as you possibly can.

He was singing, too,

and thinking of the last time

he kissed his wife's hand.

She was looking 
out the passenger window. 
I'm lonesome as hell, she said,

whenever you're around.

They were driving somewhere 
through flashing shafts of sun and shade,
pillars of pine-shadow and green-dusty light.

He took her hand
and said:
I wasted life. 
Why wouldn't I
waste the afterlife?

The Lament of Yoko Ono

I was so happy

that last night with you.

Every time

I see the moon,

I think of you

every single day.
 

You looked

like a skeleton

with skin on.

Wasn't that night

so scary?
is what I want to say to you.

And you would say:

Yes.

It was.