A Good Sport

Tommy's upon the rowing machine.

He plucks back and skids forward.

"Not with equal reason good," he says, "I'm older;

there's the guilt."

Meryl took me to adapted him and Joe,

his lover I wore a grey knit mini-skirt,

grey tights and sky-colored suede boots.

I'd at no time been kissed by a woman before.

Face down between her leg who was I?

His biceps new from the tanning salon,

he bends above squirting liquids.

Dribbling teas make my hair change color:

peach to honey caramel; one time it was pale butter.

He pinned my hair in configurations

that made men stare. Our lower parts

are the same color. "Even I," he says,

"slept with women"

Seth was here in December. Traced

my eyebrow outlined my lips

with his finger. I lay with my head

in his lap for an hour. I'm teaching Berger's

chapter upon the nude. My throat

constricts in the shower; I blink

back tears in the sauna.

I purchase yellow chocolate ducks, cozy,

in their nest of shredd paper.

Inside its sugar dome another immerse

cruises a green wave's squiggle.

Hard pink icing encircles the aperture.

On top: a crowded blue rosette.

On my parents' bed, we picked, from verdant

grass cellophane, yellow marshmallow chicks. I dream I pluck a baby's carriage,

pillows in the bottom rack. Each single

is an alphabet stop up embroidered

with letters: "a," "p" "e"

I turn round the last one over,

the "r" a unrevealed no one has seen.

Mornings I check the mirror to diocese

if my breasts no one's touched since December

have tilted lower. In Joe's photographs,

little chinese spirits, skirted like Casper,

tinted, superimposed, collection in cherub formation

at a mustached man's shoulder.

A brace argues on a couch, a sooty vapor

genie interposed. Where Tommy reclines

little ones, fork-tongued,

carry gold gilt pitchforks.

Last week he divide [i]or[/i] sever my bangs, showed me

a photo of his 20 year advanced in years Today he

and the black-haired kouros sauntered past me

Ingres' is the in a state of nature I cannot

forget: her back a polished white terrain.

I one time held an ivory tusk.

So heavy, in like manner small, to kill

the ease of the elephant for.

Demon that painters make cupids,

turn me spin me Tommy and I

lift each mask at the ball

seeking the male child with a bow.

We tender our little hearts boxed up

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Mar/Apr 1998

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