Yes / No / Yes
The day after that unexpected night,
Trees were set to scatter blossoms; the sun
Evaporated all our camouflage:
We were no longer friends, but lovers.
I felt I could splash through petals: At last—
Like spoons sliding together—we’d coupled!
But you, nervous, seemed a storehouse of ice:
You murmured “Goodbye” with distasteful haste.
I couldn’t. I begged you for a pleasing
Farewell—perhaps to make love one last time,
So I could nurse a pious memory.
Then, blossoms showed the insolence of sparks,
And, as dusk came, you came to bed again,
Yielding: I dreamt I was conquering snow.
In a Copenhagen Kitchen
In Copenhagen, as we dished breakfast,
You recalled deceased love, a French poet
Now dead, who loved his son, but let you starve
And freeze, when you took to France, seeking love.
You recited this grim, Grimm-like story,
As we gorged, forging our bellies’ surfeit.
Hot-blooded and fleshed out Satisfaction
Killed off the French poet’s skeletal chill.
Gratified by our feast, we took to bed,
And you were warm and wet and as fulfilled
As a Danish, similarly creamy
As it is finished, so nourishingly.
I’m glad that these sonnets can’t sate hunger
Or heat rooms. This poet makes love, not his poems.
Seven Hours
My love poems must leap ahead seven hours
To reach you where you sleep, where April’s flowers
Will bloom seven hours earlier than here.
I wait for slow eons to disappear,
So we can date and mate, in timely ways
That elongate until they are timeless.
But, first, I write. I compose—while you sleep—
A sonnet worth reading while starlings peep,
And I’m sleeping, reaping dreams—our harvest
Of Absence, that abyss manifest,
A nothingness, pure mist, where each is ghost—
Sexless, or a wraith—isolate and lost.
Those seven hours splitting us must even
To fiesta, what flits home to heaven.
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