Date night
You say montessori is a long con and hold out your glass for someone to fill it with pinot you say this is how a bird’s eye works you say there are constellations that are really inside jokes e.g. Chad the Orthodontist you say you’ll share your manifesto in exchange for disco fries the preamble is all about a woman artist getting older about painting against expectations people should buy art that undermines their expectations is a political statement as is men should buy women’s art even when it laughs at them you say even when it burns their money you say this is a time of neon and honeysuckle each of us has the right to walk alone at night to fireflies and grass growing through cracks in the sidewalk each of us we have a right you say to have a story about a flower
First published in Woman Halved.
Mr. Korn
After his wife died my esteemed former teacher Mr. Korn who taught me Berryman and Lowell began buying what he called economy size bottles of white wine and would invite me over on summer afternoons to try to keep pace with him at nineteen i still had the chance to be famous and happy sitting in my ex teacher’s kitchen our twin clouds of cigarette smoke mixing as he tried to explain pain like it was The Aeneid and i tried to reassure him there was still the beauty of the mountains and trees to live for which was stupid but this isn’t a poem about an old teacher or grief it’s about being so so young you think you can talk your way out of loss i miss that sometimes
History lesson
Maybe i should ask the old man in an undershirt kicking trash like it was a soccer ball down magazine street what “all good” could possibly mean during the decline of empire there was a rumor today the president was missing and i felt nothing it’s been so long since my wife and i went dancing most nights we take turns reading the federalist papers to each other i’m disappointed i’m not my father but even that disappointment may prove useful fuel for my series of adventure stories of a boy lost with his dog in the third story we discover the boy’s mother is a tree as she lowers her long branches to embrace him critics will roll their eyes like i rolled my eyes at the guy at the soup kitchen who claimed freemasons killed Stanley Kubrick because he revealed their satanic orgies in Eyes Wide Shut when we were young my wife and i snuck into a masons’ hall in Concord Mass. and saw some stuff women in chainmail bras drumming and chanting but i don’t think they were real masons because they were women i don’t know why they were even there my wife kept suggesting we leave and go make love in a field across from the hardware store but i was too scared of the local constabulary afraid of getting caught and this is how regret first entered our warm country