Indoors by David Kennedy
The moralists are back, cruising overhead
in patched and wheezing balloons,
winding themselves over the cities
in their rusty cable cars, peering peevishly
this way and that through opera glasses.
The year dithers. It’s the month of
something to do with interest rates
or an election that’s just another tale
of love, laughter and mistaken identity.
And so we assume the destiny of our love:
I take it for granted you’re a bridge
where I look down into my own raging waters;
I’m really something atomized and flung
from your cables. I’m better off indoors
where the phone’s comforting mockery
of something organic, my young tom running in
all cheerful and shiny like a new top hat.
A Love Poem
O how lovely! The intransitives are in season,
scarlet and insistent on the pedals of the night.
Now, as I smear a few words around the glass
of evening, perfect duties and pure motives
seem as close to me as the stars. In fact,
you haven’t crossed my mind for a long time now
but then you’d have to be a different person
from the one I remember because my mind,
just lately, is like Miami Beach restored:
its Art Deco hotels are stunning all over again in their Twenties pastels;
the botched and pitted bone of its moon
has been replaced with a craftsman-made replica
of the original mother of pearl disk. Light has come home.
And tonight… Tonight, I met a woman…
Her hair… I wanted. I wanted to put it
in a bag and take it home with me…
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