On the lam from Colonial America, the MLA and Lisa, Matt
found himself in a room with somebody's maps and forgotten lines and Leah.
Sound-fade: contented sigh over shot of shrieking twins—
the boy, Gabriel, slams his fontanelle
on my kitchen floor. Matt heads for a cigarette,
through spilled formula and fresh blood and an elbow.
And whose, you will ask, is the elbow?
If you figure it out, please tell Matt.
Having finished his cigarette,
he’s back, all smiles, hails Leah,
who is still dabbing a near-ruptured fontanelle,
still comforting her begrimed and roaring twins.
And without comfort herself.
when first I met them—Leah bending an elbow
with the booziest of our boypoet friends, tendril fontanelles
and spinning bonnets blooming on her rosebud lips, as Matt
looked besottedly up at her, his only Leah,
his second chance, and lit his umpteenth cigarette.
I woke in the morning to a desolation of stubbed cigarettes
and couples and friends tumbled like twins
in the womb of their headachey dreams. And Leah
made breakfast and then, steering me by the elbow
to a room where sat the man himself, said that Matt
had grown unrecognizably dark. Ah, such a fontanelle
is fragile hope, and love is a fontanelle—
so exposed while growing together—or again it's a cigarette,
newly lit and soon stubbed out. And Matt
sat dark with having stubbed Lisa. How shame twins
love, how love and burden entwine and hang heavy from your elbow.
He and I nodded and looked across at Leah:
girlishly blond, astute and womanly-wise Leah,
who knew Milton and knew what a fontanelle
was already, and could tell her ass from her elbow
in matters of love, and was not adverse to cigarettes
or good Guiness, and was willing to bear Matt twins.
She smiled like clear water, and we looked back across at Matt.
Back in the kitchen, my admiring gaze holds Matt and Leah,
the stout twins and their fucking fontanelles.
Dood. That's one helluva byootiful little compact Roman a or novella or tragicomedy of manners... It hurts my heart how all them intersecting glances and smiles 'tween adults get so dang jangled by the kidnoise and how once their heads harden they'll be loving unfulfilledly and self medicating, too.
ReplyDeleteI guess there's a lot of looking back and forth. Not sure how interesting that is or how it came about. Maybe the me character should say something really great at the end. Suggestions?
ReplyDelete"Goodnight. And good luck." or something like that, but hell, I'm drunk on rose-ay so what do I know.
ReplyDeleteWould like an explanation of the verse form.
ReplyDeleteIt's jus a ole sestina, is all. Got it off a aquiline-nosed troubadour I met on the green fields of Harvard University. You just recycle six endwords six times, rearranging them each time thusly: 6/1, 5/2, 4/3. And then stick on an envoi (or something it's called) of a final tercet which is the same thing sped up. It's like as croutons are to the original loaf or kindnesses to Love.
ReplyDeleteAh, like that one about Popeye that John Ashbery, maybe, wrote.
ReplyDeleteYeah, zackly. I was just looking at that a few days ago. You like Ashbery?
ReplyDeleteSometimes. I haven't read much, but I like his dang urbane cheakiness. Tragicomedian, maybe?
ReplyDelete