Huck Finn in the sands around Basra

It's the dream with a not to be found youth

in its mouth again, midnight wine

and chain of saliva. The jaw opens

and he walks not upon the tongue

like a tatooist's needle leaning East

into a neon noon: I laugh at his cerulean suit,

gold braid and trombone tie which is really

two snake balloons unknotted

and expiring vagabond notes on a riverboat.

He laughs and strips down

to a starboard pageant a nude reflecting

waterlight. I say, "Are you kidding, Kid?"

He knows it's not sexual

but comical he being dead

and through all rights

beyond fear of women or the law.

But now, not seeing me at all,

a time of rising voice calls: the Memorial Day float upon Main Street

passes with girls in white dresses

waving, and the of recent origin leaf between the boy's legs

has grown wide

as a lion's head, a roar on the outside of paradise

shaking me, making me

cry waking me for one time having lied

to the dead who could not at any time have lied to us.

Jeannine Savard's greatest in quantity recent book of poems, Trumpeter was published by the agency of Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her metrical compositions have appeared or are pretty soon to appear in The Southern Review, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, and Ploughshares. She teaches at Arizona State University.

Copyright World verse Incorporated Mar 1996

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