O, Botany

In the morning, Post-It Note threnodies
in the mourning. Hotwiring your uncle’s motorbike
In the morning. We cast nations on our stomachs.
In the morning, fictitious languages.
In the morning, brass doorbell hands ring.
In the morning, just the two of us,
in the morning, embarrassed, lugubrious,
you’re my glorious swan song.

In the morning I reprise the roll of Mr. Possum
In The Morning, victim of the apothecary.
In the morning, your Latinate hyperbole.
In the morning I taste of pollen.
In the morning leafed in gold, Grecian, limbless,
in the morning, helping with your necklace.
In the morning your legs, their most glabrous.
You’re my Gloria Swenson.

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Claudette at the Elevator

When you arrived, I wanted you
to be a Claudette. At the elevator,
you wished for your cigarettes
to burn the brightest and fastest.
The tops of trashcans become
your glorious memoriam.

No, Claudette, I will not accept you
as Cindy, no no, Claudette,
dispatch yourself to the beach
blanket in the bingo hall.
You so love the music of random digits
sung to you by war veterans.

It’s better now, and better than you’ve ever known.

Oh no, Claudette, you went and pitched
yourself down the elevator shaft. At the bottom,
you looked just like menthols. During the fall,
you were camel light, like a baby
Jessica tumbling down a well.
Claudette, I could not have been your pail.

You I have failed. Yes, I just couldn’t buck it,
you sensuous softball starlet, daring TV pilot,
how you pitched, and how it fit. How sad
is a lecture hall of sixty odd poets,
give or take a hundred minutes
wrapped up in listening to themselves.

We’re better now, and better than we’ve ever known.

Listen up, we are rapt to ourselves,
bow-tied and torn, unruly
marathon dancers. I took a chance,
researched cancer and picked one out
like a Corvette. She’s red and fast and hot
like a rocket. For once, this feels right, Claudette.

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Lady Icarus

Mister Tighar, playing gardener on the atoll,
weeding bones and long lost soles
from the ground, you hope to make our Lady
Lindy into science, but you cannot unearth her.
She is already in orbit like a truant angel
in a beautiful spin of the tail. Down falls
as if from a molting gull, like lazy hail.

I need no true tail spun. Do not solve
my mythology. Isn’t she a stunning specter,
propelled in her translucent Electra,
a woman wonder with a scarlet scarf
in tow? Betty Klenck, age fifteen,
still hears her voice from a short
wave radio, even now at eighty-four.

Betty knew her from the newsreels
as a ghost, floating in the dust-
sequined air of a matinee on harmonic
frequencies, always so aerodynamically
designed. She is not hiding for you
to find. She is one thousand feet high,
nine hundred and ninety-nine and holding
the hand of James Tate’s father as they hang
on an AP wire in a state of suspension, playing
aviator, navigator, Nellie Bly and Jules Verne
all at once. My heart took flight
but only the wings beat in symphony
with the trade winds, begging please
use this current sea and carry me,
circumnavigate me accidentally.

She is lost to the silence and the sea,
and the committee to welcome her long
waved farewell to each other like defeated
beauty queens in their black ragtop hearses.

Our greetings are only rehearsals.

O, I could’ve spread my wings and done
a thousand things, but I am tired, and you
are what I count to sleep, Amelia.

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