If I were looking for holes in the ceiling, I might find work
& love. This is the way it goes, when you’re between angels
as I have been most of my life. Now is a time of not dancing,
despite the music, its funky unmistakable bass line.
In different hours, no doubt, there’d be different music
because there are always riffs & reciprocities, even here
this landscape at the end of the century. I am thinking now
not of a girl I once loved & the woman she has become
but of the insistence of beauty—though I’ll admit, it’s her
beauty that still comes to me, invasive as loosestrife.
I was full of lust and good usage then, & now, who’s to say?
Most days I play my part in the circus of needs,
get in my little clown car and drive home. It’s rush hour,
local time, & that means the traffic is doing what traffic
always does. If she could see me now, what would she say,
as I do my five impersonations, all of myself.
We make our local visitations beyond Hammonton,
winter at the Caspian Sea, & spend the rest of our days
here in the walking light of the mountains,
where the fog closes in around the windows some mornings
& the good self does the chores that need to be done:
takes out the garbage, throws old bread to the birds,
curses the heart’s unruly squirrel which chatters sometimes
incessantly, &, when it’s silent, looks for it to come back.