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CHERRYBLOSSOM TATTOO
Half made up, all the way crazy, shirt undone and a hairband for a husband, this bedrock to the lake's
slippery as hell, love is a one way street back in town and it is a slick path down to the water
Spring is no lover but it comes quick and that's how she wants it, she's got a cherryblossom tattoo on
her back, the way she breathes is rough as bark, sexy, very thick, choked with new leaves and ready for more
White blossom, there's an old white blossom in her eyes
The lake glows dark and is forgiving and yes, she sits silent and waits, something's moving down there.
something hungry and moving and wild
A waterbug, a leaf suspended, the quick leap
George Wallace
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ONE-EYED HOUSECAT WITH A CROOKED TAIL
I saw a road that climbed halfway to heaven and where it stopped there was a floodgate and a whirlwind
and a Dutch windmill and a bolt of lightning, and a roadhouse full of working men
A piano and a mirror and a chandelier and miners drinking beer and bunkbeds and oil rigs and gold and
tin and a Buick with a burnt out clutch, bedbugs and rattlesnakes
And mice in the ranchhouse and livestock in the holding pen
And a one-eyed housecat with a crooked tail
And behind every rock and tree the government of men, which was a gas powered shovel stuck deep as
a needle into the piehole of the world
George Wallace
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IN HER FATHER’S HOUSE TIME WAS A SONATA
AND EVERYTHING WAS FORETOLD
What she wanted was to sit in the profound silence of the world, which was greater than the both of
them, and greater moreover than that, to sit with him as she sat in her father’s house
What she wanted was to let the evening insinuate itself into their lives gradually, and then dance itself
out of existence, with its soft radiance, the radiance of a rose, to accept the gestures of time
The way she had been taught, to move easily among the pleasures of her father’s house, shadows
were enough, in her father’s house time was a sonata and everything was foretold
The accumulation of days might have added gracefully to their lives too, if only he would let them, oh
this man, she wanted to remember each of their days as distinct, each flowing into each other
She wanted to hold his hand and circle him, like a child on her first carousel, in her imagination life was
musical, sharing it was a promenade, she wanted them to fall together into the apogee
To wrap themselves into each other like darkness or the return of day, to suffer with him, to live and die
and accept things as they are, until it was all over
But he was not like that, he was like the other men
Remarkable in all the usual ways, always in a hurry even when he was sitting still, what is this fever
which possesses them? She would never understand men, so clumsy around her
He was a steampipe fitter, off tune as a calliope, big bold and inefficient, his hand in her hands was
eager and bright and dumbfounded, useful as a dog or a horse but uncomprehending
He was cautious with his phrases and fearful of the personal, he avoided the invisible realities in which
her imagination thrived, the higher sensibilities, like a priest avoids the plague
You could fit what he knew about women into a clamshell and watch it float out to sea
If a clamshell could float, but they don’t
George Wallace__
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