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After The Bath
Brown hair so wet it looks black,
each strand tipped with a droplet,
cheeks scrubbed pink as azalea,
she smells like expensive shampoo.
She dabbles at drying off,
a speck of soapsuds on her face
placed like a beauty mark.
She moves to the edge of the tub,
smiles with big eyes in the mirror,
a study of flesh and porcelain.
Her dimples are freckled,
a stipple of sweat dots her breasts,
clammy as wax fruit, spotted
as an orchid.
The artist would watch her all day,
patted and lathered with lotion,
combing her hair with her fingers,
though she mumbles fatigue and hunger.
She fondles with the towel,
finds her clothes, and walks
out of the studio, into the air.
Sleeve taught me the square knot,
slipknot, clove hitch; he could tie
any kind of knot. He could make stuff out
of almost anything: hickory bark whistles;
tree houses with no nails in the oak;
ponchos from garbage bags; tents of twine
and cardboard, sticks and pine straw;
he could turn a scarf into a tourniquet.
He was handy with a hatchet and a hook
and chanted grief over birds he caught
with string before he cooked them.
He could live in the woods for weeks
with a pocket knife and rope.
But he couldn't stand the city.
It made him hard and bitter as an acorn.
He hated cars, and animals in cages.
We'd sit up on the hill and cuss the world
"I'm tired of the shit, Bob." "What shit?"
I'd say. Then he'd fan out his hand
above the steel mill's orange expanse
and say, "They're killing it."
He may have meant the swatch of linden trees
we used to climb. Houses grow there now.
He was happy among the rocks and lichens,
singing and naked and stalking deer,
rhapsodizing wildly on the beauty of a doe:
"If I could catch it, I'd fuck it."
They hated it when he talked that way,
like he did on the day he broke down the door
of the dayroom and took a taxi home.
It wasn't long before he was back in lockup
where the sturdy cloth of his Boy Scout shirt
made a nifty noose.
Lawyer's Daughter
A splotch of red rose in her face
where she'd rubbed rouge
into her makeup, this girl who'd never
blushed before, my freckle-faced girl
whose skin belongs to the beach.
Pink streaks, smeared like blood
on fleshy bandages, ran from each cheekbone
to the diamonds in her lobes.
Tears left trails across her blush
like streams of sweat on dirty children.
She curled her lips up in disgust
and shot a glance of anger in a vector
toward my face--the physics of her love,
our first and last fight.
I left in the rain and cried in the car,
a country music tragic hero.
After an hour, back at her house,
I rang her bell and got her wet
out of the shower, her hair in ringlets,
dripping at the door, her terry cloth robe
with one green stripe like a stolen hotel towel.
All for a clammy simulated hug
and one last kiss my ass.
I try to hate her now, try to think
about the frog in the throat
her magic made me, try not to think
about her big-boned body, how I used to call
her healthy, how it always made her mad
because she thinks her stomach's chubby.
Not so. But her breasts are large,
and her butt is fat.
Monday Morning
Two miles away on the mountainside
the flash of new car windshields
through the high plain heat waves
like a strobe in the smoking room
of a head shop, all beads and incense
smoke and brash dashikis dancing
in the weird perspectives of day-glo
M.C. Ecsher posters under black light:
They flicker on and off like fireflies
in peyote trances. A lamp clicks off.
Traffic on the cloverleaf, still calm,
will grow until the drivers start to rage.
Then the day will whisper something strange,
and I'll look through a haze of Thorazine
while the sun burns yellow as Valium.
Sunrise Wednesday
Streams of fog laid on in layers with a trowel
look like the sea this morning out my window.
For a moment I thought the train horn was a tug,
the car noise crashing waves.
Waking after an eight hour sleep, I'm rested,
playful, numb to noise that bothered me last week
in my insomnia. My response is instant, quick
as coffee perking. This is an aromatic morning
filled with mist.
Spires, steeples, and antennae stick up
from a fog bank trough into the air above
Red Mountain. A crane derrick thrusts
its way into a low cloud. An ancient steel mill,
like a battleship, sails among the poplar masts.
The skyline is a harbor full of sloops.
The ship-shaped skeleton of an abandoned high-rise
flies a Jolly Roger in the blank white light.