TWO

In pink you are not a natural animal, so today let's eat
breakfast with slow, practiced bites cause I love you.

Despite this the pancakes we're splitting are horrendous,
iridescent, with syrup they're heavy as platters of sod.

Remember the breakfast we hosted on Nicollet Island?
The room was deep in concerns and juice and waffles.

That was the day we got away, my favorite
wedding of us. We ate eggs off plates.

This spring is a season for decision, indiscretion:
the animal in me will crack in this dank planet

and I would like to make myself a daughter, a girl
with the marshmallow bones of a bird.

The skulls of birds are mere bubbles of bone,
gum-thin, will break at a tap:

but birds are crazy with animal power,
survive in their natural wit. They are simple, as I am.

Those summers on St. Anthony were thick with our lunches.
We ate the Lord's supper and drank our own wine.

I am eager for the damp of my wife,
and she is afraid that we might have a daughter.

Every skirt she washes is divorce, and
every divorce she decides on could be massive.

Our love is helpless and noble, like,
I suppose, some diorama of love.

__

THE NIGHT WE DIDN'T SEE V FOR VENDETTA

The movie is really a whole lot of mints,
a mustering of sexy and diagonal
violence, and this is the killing:
with all these knives,
he probably kills
weeks

of people,
paragraphs of them.
The original comic had V
slaying fascists on staircases or something.
The film is set in the death of a New London
future, one

gross with
the smell of hair gel, the pastel
moods of phone books, the black yards of sick lovers, of no texture.
The conservatives in the film reject homo-
sexuals, and Natalie
Portman rails

at drizzle
from the political
heavens, a drizzle that went all mean
and physical, clean-toasting her brown locks
to a cussed nibble. Things have to do with Christ and with
the Devil. Return

of the Jedi
ends with ghosts
in bluey-white, Jedis who died
neutral and pleased in a universe of laser
swords. They are apparently a part of death. We saw a marquee in Florida
that read:

V for
Vendetta, and
the love for her became better
than an emergency, like you're pregnant plus a hero, heaving
baskets full of victory, your body light
as health.

__

on THE NIGHT WE DIDN'T SEE V FOR VENDETTA:
Driving along the coast of Florida one night last spring, a friend and
I suddenly became oddly overwhelmed by a desire to see V for Vendetta.
In the heat of the moment nothing at all sounded more desirable. The
movie, however, did not open until the next day, and so our desire was
definitively insatiable. I still have not seen the movie (the desire
has returned, but never so strongly).

on TWO:
Stories, and words themselves, might be physical in lots of ways: they
are hard and you can hold them.