Summer Pulse
The night danced with discord
between the green impulse of scratching an itch without looking,
and the yellow flower you never left on her doorstep.
The ladies order libations of innocent oblivion and refined sugar.
The men, strong facades and manufactured smiles.
All a slightly flat note of disillusionment.
You consider the stars that wait for you
out where the water meets the horizon,
with a long drink and a short cigar. It isn’t love —
not even close — but perhaps a consolation, an injection
to relieve a little pressure.
Instead, an open neon light pulls at your peripheral
and says I have one more stop: one for Old Blue-Eyes,
and one more for the road. A familiar salesman behind the bar
greets you by name, and it almost feels like butterflies:
a magical ending to a long dark hallway.
He surfs between smiles, passing out tickets to the last legal drug,
and you take one like a puppy wagging, wagging,
and finally the hard drink hits your lips cold
and nearly swallows you whole. Now a wolf, who no longer belongs
to the night because you escaped it.
Wheels keep on spinning, bottles turning upside down,
ice clinking like congratulations are in order.
Then at just the right hour, in just right lighting,
she storms the scene like Don Quixote,
with the confidence of a flower about to bloom,
and orders a glass of barley and a garnish of fireside.
She devours the second and drags the first, like someone who stands
against the world, romanticizes ideas during the day,
and needs a refuge before calculating, scheming for the next.
You saw this once in a premonition: a woman seeks truth at all hours,
lubricating and lubricating, one empty glass after another,
then dies before your eyes, before she finds it.
That piece of your heart you thought you’d never see again,
regret, and a chance to make it right, all at once walk into the bar,
but you pretend not to notice.
She sparks like a star and shoots like she always knows her target:
a trained claw at the bottom of the ocean. There’s no way to prepare.
The ladies and their sweet eyelashes are not enough to move you,
to catch you, to pin you wriggling and writhing against the wall.
Focused on higher pursuits, you can only laugh at their sugar:
a temporary pleasure in the larger windmill of life.
Still a wolf, the moon calls you by name,
into a more dangerous reflection. You follow her
out toward the unknown where a stick lights her fingers with fire,
drawn to her mouth with repetition like breathing, like walking,
like rain. A poem of smoke drips between her lips
and escapes into the dark air,
with words from Byron, Yeats, Poe, Hughes, Stevens.
You recall their precedent, their incision, their line breaks,
as she introduces you to wise men you’ve certainly met
but have since lost their numbers.
Once the fire dies, she turns back to the familiar face of her barley,
leaving you there to feel like a puppy again, soaked
by the night, by the dark mist of dead poets.
She doesn’t even hesitate. The only other philosopher in a bar,
in a world, saturated by fools, steps under the neon sign
and out of sight forever. The stars, the cigars, the disillusionment,
what does it matter? As some sparkler as sharp as truth itself slips
into the night — already damp with pain — and then disappears.
It doesn’t. Except, that you loved her once,
inside of that sacred moment: the glimmer, the tease of dawn,
the rope that might’ve been strong enough to pull you out,
to save you, to show you how easy breathing is.
When the wheel is spinning so long it almost looks invisible,
when the bottle stops, when the ice melts and becomes mute,
when nothing is worth congratulating because everything’s lost,
the butterflies leave, taking their miracle with them.
