It's Too Late

 

Yupo 20 x 20 cm ink/gouache on paper

TARZAN’S COMMON LAW WIFE

O Jane, where art thou

as the icons of lust

gather on the billboards?

Where were you while summer

wallowed in the shallow end

like a despotic thug, a facilitator

of imperial crime, while others

did all the work?

And you without regrets, playing house

in a tropical tree fort.

The rest of us need love, Jane,

the rest of us need lots of love

O Jane. Meanwhile,

humidity is revising the record books

as far back as 1910. To each his own fetish.

To each his own consolation. We can roll back

the comforters now, open the big bays

for the damp air to circle our lonely thoughts. 

Thicket

Dickicht - Thicket 20 x 20 cm gouache/ink/spray paint on paper

BINIARAIX

It is beautiful here in this

unpronounceable place. Have you 

ever wanted to make love to a landscape?

Smoke rising from the orchards  

as shapely and transparent as a negligee

made of sheerest muslin, untouchable,

covering it all but just barely. I want to get hold

of the sunlight that drips off the palm trees here  

and smear it all over your body. How would

you respond? Have me arrested?

Involve me in a fight with your boyfriend? I’ll tell

you my name first, then give you some biographical details….

(Later, in the village tavern) hey, hombre,

I ask the guy sitting next to me at the bar

how do you get that smell around here that is 

so evocative of lemon peel all wrapped up in itself, cloves, cinna-

mon, olive oil, a dab of honey rubbed deeply  

into the succulent flesh of an organic

free-range chicken stuffed with garlic toes

roasting in its own juices?

Usually it comes evenings when the mountain’s

dissolved in shadows, and the crickets swell and roar

and the dogs are barking at other dogs barking

and the cock lies down with the hen.

Can I live here forever, I beg, totally losing it,

can I die here on this beer-stained, saw-dusty spot?

Fortunately he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.

New, Tender, Quick

Rot-Orange II (Red-Orange II) ink/oil pastel on paper 20 x 20 cm

NEW, TENDER, QUICK

The rich complain about cooking odors/ dysfunctional

         mothers looking like gothic statues  

in an East German church/ hay rick, manure

        ditches, skin head revelry/ where the rich

                    would never go/ destined to concern

ourselves with issues trivial at best/ we read

          Elizabeth Bishop anyway, “my outlook

is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians/ barbarians

             who commit a hundred indecencies everyday of our lives…”/

trying to stay positive, still it seems you

      are not only watching TV/ you’re on it/ handcuffed and walking

into the county courthouse/ some deputy’s wind breaker

thrown over your head/ cooking odors from a food stand/

            life tastes pretty good as you raise taco to mouth/ smells,

well, interesting as you rise past the doorways of drinking associates

   and mere neighbors, radio noise, animal habits, fugitive states of mind

no one will ever capture, cowering in the manure ditch,

hay rick/ utterly trivial/ stubbornly ourselves/ “…but I think we should

be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy—to make life endurable

    and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick,” (George Herbert).”/ whiff

of hot dogs from the river’s edge, black lab rolling in the sand/

                                     two boys and three girls emerge

        from brown water/ giddy yet watchful/ light in their hair.