Rita Dove

Imagine you wake up with a second chance: The blue jay hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade. If you don't look back, the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight, in the prodigal smell of biscuits - eggs and sausage on the grill. The whole sky is yours to write on, blown open to a blank page. Come on, shake a leg! You'll never know who's down there, frying those eggs, if you don't get up and see.

For Fred I could pick anything and think of you— This lamp, the wind-still rain, the glossy blue My pen exudes, drying matte, upon the page. I could choose any hero, any cause or age And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart, Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart As standing in silver stirrups will allow— There you'll be, with furrowed brow And chain mail glinting, to set me free: One eye smiling, the other firm upon the enemy. This post-postmodern age is all business: compact disks And faxes, a do-it-now-and-take-no-risks Event. Today a hurricane is nudging up the coast, Oddly male: Big Bad Floyd, who brings a host Of daydreams: awkward reminiscences Of teenage crushes on worthless boys Whose only talent was to kiss you senseless. They all had sissy names—Marcel, Percy, Dewey; Were thin as licorice and as chewy, Sweet with a dark and hollow center. Floyd's Cussing up a storm. You're bunkered in your Aerie, I'm perched in mine (Twin desks, computers, hardwood floors): We're content, but fall short of the Divine. Still, it's embarrassing, this happiness— Who's satisfied simply with what's good for us, When has the ordinary ever been news? And yet, because nothing else will do To keep me from melancholy (call it blues), I fill this stolen time with you.

Velvet fruit, exquisite square I hold up to sniff between finger and thumb - how you numb me with your rich attentions! If I don't eat you quickly, you'll melt in my palm. Pleasure seeker, if i let you you'd liquefy everywhere. Knotted smoke, dark punch of earth and night and leaf, for a taste of you any woman would gladly crumble to ruin. Enough chatter: I am ready to fall in love!

for Michael S. Harper Billie Holiday’s burned voice had as many shadows as lights, a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano, the gardenia her signature under that ruined face. (Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass, magic spoon, magic needle. Take all day if you have to with your mirror and your bracelet of song.) Fact is, the invention of women under siege has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness as she paused just inside the double glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape billowing dramatically behind her.What’s this, I thought, lifting a hand until she nodded and started across the parquet; that’s when I saw she was dressed all in gray, from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl down to the graphite signature of her shoes. “Sorry I’m late,” she panted, though she wasn’t, sliding into the chair, her cape tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel. We kissed. Then I leaned back to peruse my blighted child, this wary aristocratic mole. “How’s business?” I asked, and hazarded a motherly smile to keep from crying out: Are you content to conduct your life as a cliché and, what’s worse, an anachronism, the brooding artist’s demimonde? Near the rue Princesse they had opened a gallery cum souvenir shop which featured fuzzy off-color Monets next to his acrylics, no doubt, plus bearded African drums and the occasional miniature gargoyle from Notre Dame the Great Artist had carved at breakfast with a pocket knife. “Tourists love us. The Parisians, of course”— she blushed—“are amused, though not without a certain admiration ...” The Chateaubriand arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy; one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming. “Admiration for what?” Wine, a bloody Pinot Noir, brought color to her cheeks. “Why, the aplomb with which we’ve managed to support our Art”—meaning he’d convinced her to pose nude for his appalling canvases, faintly futuristic landscapes strewn with carwrecks and bodies being chewed by rabid cocker spaniels. “I’d like to come by the studio,” I ventured, “and see the new stuff.” “Yes, if you wish ...” A delicate rebuff before the warning: “He dresses all in black now. Me, he drapes in blues and carmine— and even though I think it’s kinda cute, in company I tend toward more muted shades.” She paused and had the grace to drop her eyes. She did look ravishing, spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue, or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace peering through a fringe of rain at Paris’ dreaming chimney pots, each sooty issue wobbling skyward in an ecstatic oracular spiral. “And he never thinks of food. I wish I didn’t have to plead with him to eat ....” Fruit and cheese appeared, arrayed on leaf-green dishes. I stuck with café crème. “This Camembert’s so ripe,” she joked, “it’s practically grown hair,” mucking a golden glob complete with parsley sprig onto a heel of bread. Nothing seemed to fill her up: She swallowed, sliced into a pear, speared each tear-shaped lavaliere and popped the dripping mess into her pretty mouth. Nowhere the bright tufted fields, weighted vines and sun poured down out of the south. “But are you happy?” Fearing, I whispered it quickly. “What? You know, Mother”— she bit into the starry rose of a fig— “one really should try the fruit here.” I’ve lost her, I thought, and called for the bill.

What did he do except lie under a pear tree, wrapped in a great cloak, and meditate on the heavenly bodies? Venerable , the good people of Baltimore whispered, shocked and more than a little afraid. After all it was said he took to strong drink. Why else would he stay out under the stars all night and why hadn’t he married? But who would want him! Neither Ethiopian nor English, neither lucky nor crazy, a capacious bird humming as he penned in his mind another enflamed letter to President Jefferson—he imagined the reply, polite and rhetorical. Those who had been to Philadelphia reported the statue of Benjamin Franklin before the library his very size and likeness. A wife? No, thank you. At dawn he milked the cows, then went inside and put on a pot to stew while he slept. The clock he whittled as a boy still ran. Neighbors woke him up with warm bread and quilts. At nightfall he took out his rifle—a white-maned figure stalking the darkened breast of the Union—and shot at the stars, and by chance one went out. Had he killed? I assure thee, my dear Sir! Lowering his eyes to fields sweet with the rot of spring, he could see a government’s domed city rising from the morass and spreading in a spiral of lights....

We were dancing—it must have been a foxtrot or a waltz, something romantic but requiring restraint, rise and fall, precise execution as we moved into the next song without stopping, two chests heaving above a seven-league stride—such perfect agony, one learns to smile through, ecstatic mimicry being the sine qua non of American Smooth. And because I was distracted by the effort of keeping my frame (the leftward lean, head turned just enough to gaze out past your ear and always smiling, smiling), I didn’t notice how still you’d become until we had done it (for two measures? four?)—achieved flight, that swift and serene magnificence, before the earth remembered who we were and brought us down.

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting. Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert. Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips. Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines. They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl, One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door. “Can you feel it yet?” they whisper. I don’t know what to say, again. They chuckle, Patting their sleek bodies with their hands. “Well, maybe next time.” And they rise, Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight, And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness. Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.