L O V E

Blick von Deya - Deya-Vista 28,5 x 38,5 cm

LOVE

It’s good work if you can get it—

that’s what a skeptic might say—but it doesn’t

pay the rent, my friend, it’s all perks, a jazz quartet

in the lobby of a hipster hotel in lower Manhattan

playing the coolest of Brubeck and Miles

and Charles Mingus too, yes, Charles himself. Sometimes love is

fried scampi with pinot grigio—ah, my love, we adore delicious

food, middle-age entering its Major Phase in silk dressing gown  

as a paunchy, grandly decayed author dictating to his assistant

the Great Unreadable Cookbook—goat cheese

spread on slices of sour dough bread warming us 

up, “as it were,” for wild boar stuffed with rum soaked plums.

Love is Olivia Hussey in Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet,” she with eyelashes

like wings shadowing cheekbone and dimple. Even though I

detested the “school dance” and all it stood for—one nation under

teenage stupidity, with liberty and justice for no one else    

but dumb-assed jocks, of course, and the girls who     

jerked them off in Mustangs, Firebirds, on front porch swings—

I would have taken Olivia to the Junior Prom: so there she is

spreading ripples of dismay and desire and astonishment

at the freshness of her beauty, her iambic pentameter   

otherness. I hear a sprinkler sputter-stutter into life, a basket-

ball pounding in the driveway, “Whole lotta Love” ripping through

my open bedroom window. The world’s going nuts, but this time it’s not so bad.    

 

Glory Box - Portishead