Three Poems (2005)
I Saw Johnny Depp in Secret Window
I go to the movies alone on Monday nights
Weariness makes me taut like the screen
Blank and white
Ready to receive the likes of that crazy Johnny Depp
I guess for some it’s the looks
But for me it’s the subtle Chaplin humor
After my ticket is torn I head to a stall
So I’m not pulled out of the best scenes
By those tired demands
As I come out I see the urinals
And realize in a B movie twist I’m in another dimension
The realm of the wrong sex
I plan a daring escape before the aliens return to the ship
Peeking my head out just enough to see
The father and son with popcorn staring at posters
The manager adding up figures on a screen
Then like characters I’ve seen in movies
I walk out slow and deliberate
So as not to attract the wrong kind of attention
I sit in the theater with couples
Their popcorn a loud crunch at the wrong moment
Their candy a rustling that muffles dialogue
The urinals hadn’t seen me
They wouldn’t tell the joke behind my back
To the next guy who stepped up
But I needed someone to laugh
And I was ashamed to be alone again in that theater
With the couples slurping through their straws
Whispering things not meant for me
In the hollow moments between trailers
After the credits I hurried through a side door
Afraid the manager had seen me after all
Lousy film, great performance and all that
Nowadays everybody goes to see Johnny Depp
They like his brand of comedy
But I am invisible at the movies
The unseen men’s room comedienne
The star that no one is watching
Mowers
The lawnmowers march steadily forward
Over neighboring countries of grass
The push mowers advance from the west
Over the fields razed so many times
They’re cracked and yellow
While the red riding mowers
Sweep around our left flank to distract us
They are loud proclaiming
Their racial supremacy dogma
The superiority of one plant over another
We sit in our garden in the late afternoon
But we can’t hear the voice of the ghost
The ghost of our venerable old gum tree
Gone all these years
Here is our appeasement:
We are growing native prairie land
We are peaceful here
We don’t need the mechanical troopers
But all over the neighborhood
The blood from the grass spills
The purges go on
And the voice of the ghost is drowned
An Apology to Garrett for the Poems
All those thee’s and thou’s,
Your dark eyes and your soul,
My breath and my inspiration -
What the hell was I thinking?
You only liked it when I called you a beautiful bastard,
A sewage romeo,
The casanova of the mop sink room.
I know because you laughed.
You wanted limericks, not sonnets,
And we were in New York City in 1998,
Not 19th century England.
You didn’t want to be
The melody that lights my dreaming mind,
Or the music I would still remember.
You didn’t want autumn’s west wind in your eyes,
And who could blame you? It would probably sting.
I was convinced I had the soul of a poet
But that soul was a damned traitor.
She will never be trusted with anything important again.
I think you and I can both be relieved about that.
July 30th, 1998,
I listened furtively to your music
Ballade No. 1, Opus 23 in G minor
Staring down the front of my filthy overalls
When you caught me in the act
And with one word,
Chopin
Acknowledged everything I’d felt for months.
That was the real poetry wasn’t it?
In that moment all that happened
Is you looked at me and knew I loved you.
As the years go by,
The things I want to say to you
Slip into the same between the lines place
As the word Chopin.
It’s a place that’s gone mute.
I don’t understand hearing your voice on the phone now.
You want to recommend some CD’s to me.
It’s a strange, late offering from you,
But I’m trying to accept it as though it were divinely ordained.
It would make you laugh to see me.
Now your music plays in my car.
One CD ends, and I grope to replace it with another.
You have provided the soundtrack for my life after all.
That was the only thing I was right about,
Saying I’d remember the music.
