MILDLY FREE
A film of love can be shot in any direction, I know
a guy with a gondola blotting the sky; his other helicopter cries
about an outbreak of renewed influenza that has hit
this bald eagle town under average war-like pretense,
we pull our daisies, chainsaw the living spaces,
swallow small medicines, and select corrugated metal sheets
for a blank-faced reverie and bloodlet collectibles
that remedy same soft underbelly situations.
Even I never thought I’d have jowls until I looked through
the mirror of glad girls, a subsidy of the Lie Group for Women
and other feminine needleworks. But let’s return to recreational
knitting now. I still don’t know how
to let go of the keyhole and pry myself loose
from this dream of constant segues—
I know we can live without love from the waist up
and the kind that flows from up above, even horses
that speak our language, but the rest remains
a place we frequent with panty-laced desire and rely upon
for everywhere with bonus scenes as yet in production,
postoperative and pre-season. Like an apricot foam,
the hand that strokes a felt-like rose stem assumes
where it’s moving and when it’s moving in.
Still waiting for you, an order of peony nuns blooms
at advance screenings to inform me you don’t know
the patience I equate with deserving, my miscalculation
on the footfall of coincidence in sexual remission with hindsight.
That premier of my badness, my blunder, my driven misgivings
for all things invisible will appear at the Garden tonight.
As is the common case though, you didn’t know my name
when you sent a note addressed to spell simple errors out:
I’m nobody’s flavor of the month and this matter holds
no righteous incense, no good odors, no fresh thigh skin to sniff.
It reminds me of how many behaviors ignore the soul’s inner lining.
Remember the way the cherry blossom words looked up
at the sun and asked, How did we get here and to what objects
do we belong? Our evenings were a bit like that, full of torpor
and mini masquerade balls in rusty brown arm chairs tied
side-by-side while we waited for the world to surrender
her love for the brotherhood of armies.
I’m still okay, except for the part where things went terribly wrong,
cleaning a few mug shots with our teenage FBI, we caught
a glimpse of persons who looked a far cry from our top shelf selves,
and thus we assumed all aliens, foreigners, wombats, and spies
would one moment be divided by cardboard and fiberglass wires,
and the next, at some bakery sharing humble pie.
So we gave away our savings, cracked open the canned goods,
and made our prayers for the end of secondary slavery
until the parental gestures were never again enough to protect
our species from accidental babies with their unpredictable offspring.
In the final credits, the mountains claimed their original heights
and the oppressor began his move over us, redux.
--Amy King, from I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU
