Your Red Robe
Your Red Robe

just barely revealing the chaotic joy that infuses the lover and the joy when the poem is good, simmering under the surface just barely not sloppy or embarassing but jubilant just underneath couched in allusions even to eliot and the romantics and just fucking good, or so i say. and poetry is where i go to church i feel santified and correct just now. was i fallow am i lazy does it matter do i care. yes i care, but maybe not enough. when it really is a matter of thinking too much that is what it is...when its worry its worry but i have other, better, more thinks around here.

i am the little curly haired blonde being held by my mother, back in - 1957? 1958? i was born in 1955...with this sunday sort of nostalgia tapping at me...

Frank & Marie, '60s

a peek into the rumpus room:
the martini shaker
stuck to the table
meant it was a fine old night

if daddy wasn't home,
the fight did not end.
his ship had hit the harbor
when those boots

pounded the porch,
when that bear
of a man burst
through the door

a welcome storm
in a drought
with cash & kisses
& sighs

that dropped on us kids,
til we thought
innocently
of manna,

Innocently, of course,
never having been
to church
or synagogue

or shrine
but that shrine
of Sunday
mornings after Martini nights

when we got
to fetch cup on cup
of black coffee
and cigarettes

from the drawer
(right of the kitchen sink)
& were allowed
to be part

of the cacophony
of ashes, spent love,
the Sunday paper
on the bed.
- posted by barbara @ 8/10/2003 05:24:00 PM