Poems

  Down the hall the davenport looms toward her, an uncharted shoal. One thing’s needed and he’s not it— arm a plank she’s forced to walk, hand a rudder to push her into shallows where a woman depends from a partner’s arm. where her right foot is his left. But the only feet are hers, She swerves the medio corte between bed and bureau, inches missed. She would not insist, ‘Let’s try that step again’. Nor sense the current change, the rhythm subtly alter, nor would she align her sights with the shoulder of Gibraltar. In the mirror her form waves back, a little older: her nightgown loose, a cotton sail, her face scrubbed clean and plain as salt. She considers the wreck of the narcissists lost on some aisle of form; shoots the rapids down the stairs to turn the Latin up and tango on the lawn.