1 New Poem

Books in Bed

It was well enough for me,
this silence in summer-mocking air,
this calm of constant refrain from
the bedside bookstand to the motioned
figures beneath sheets, living like
we’d gotten on in years past the
fitful flirtations of collegiate clumsiness,
past the blues of honeymoon contemplation
to that open water of cool-eyed passions,
still embers that heat rooms when the
windows are open.

It was so close for once,
that shade of sun you kept imprinted
in skin, that sinew of toughened mystique
you had in glittering presence, and
all those figures you had in shapely
dresswork.

But aren’t you still that bad girl’s
blandishments, that one all those Llosa
novels, all that cheap whiskey talk,
all the tired grandee strutting
had warned against?

Oh, in stillness, how wrong it was
to believe,

though it was enough for me,
if not for you.