Deconstruction

This is sandbox, goosestep
in the fields of permanence.
A light fading at noon.
The rose bush beside our house
has bloomed for thirty years.

Cut it down, you announced
in tandem with the first fevers
of menopause.

Bewitch the world, you
shouted at wrinkles
and ankle pains.

Our daughter walked away.
Our marriage decided on
a Cuban vacation. Roses
pushed into an umber horizon.
Eyesight faded until —
we danced and danced.

In the predawn cool
we build card houses
and observe their demise
one kiss at a time
when kisses are the wolf wind.

The Impossibility of Love Affairs in Book Stores

In this year of self-help, I sculpt circles in familiar blood —

a jagged scrawl as though a limping drawl,
or accent from an ancient country
has invaded the spirit of my left brain

and you congeal — dance movement
as indefinable as the identity of common clouds.

In the year of the pronoun, we have become
a trade book store on a French Quarter Rue —
somewhere near Jackson Square

where we genuflect to the smug dictators of superfluous words.

There is a prayer for poems and for coffee grounds —
for Hurricanes and for Mint Julep. There is a prayer
for the silence of street cars and begnets.

No prayers exist in the space between our first sip and our final words.