Maya
This will prove how driven and I guess desperate
I am because it’s about a really insane woman
and I mean clinically who moves in next door
when I’m about sixteen and the entire family,
five of them, are whackos who sit in their back yard
in tattered lawn chairs hooting and screaming
and they set their garbage on fire and trot around
kicking bricks for fun and you can’t talk to them
because they never answer . . . there’s the two older parents
and their grown daughter who’s about twenty-six
and her husband who wears dresses, and a little kid,
a boy I guess, but he never says a word
and he’s white like china and just kind of floats around
so I guess he’s the son of Maya, what kind of name is Maya?
because sometimes I see her pat him on the head
but here’s the thing: she goes around in these skimpy shorts
and sometimes with no top at all or just a bra
and she looks pretty good even if she’s insane
and every now and then I catch her glancing at me
and when our eyes meet she abruptly turns her head
but not before a subtle, teasing smile . . .
my family won’t have anything to do with that clan,
we tried and failed, and Dad says they’re lunatics, trash,
so they keep hooting and screaming and kicking bricks
and we try to ignore them but the sight of Maya
in those shorts worms its way into my bloodstream
and soon the transvestite husband moves out
to live in the French Quarter and dance at some club
so I keep thinking about half naked Maya
and I’m kind of scared of her and don’t like her . . .
but one night I sneak out and literally jump up to clutch
the window sill to Maya’s bedroom and her lamp is on
so I know she’s in there and I pull myself
through the window and kind of tumble into the room
and there she is sitting up naked on her bed
reading a paperback and the light is dim but she smiles
and I can’t help but notice the silver revolver
on her night table and figure she’ll shoot me
but she says nothing and comes over, lifts me
from the floor with her hand and leads me to the bed
and then she strips me of all my clothes
and yanks me flat beside her and she starts in
real slow and easy with dozens of kisses to my cheeks
and neck and down my chest and everywhere
and I can no longer bear it and it happens
and after it’s over she says, “You’re so handsome,”
which I’m not, but it’s nice to hear and they are the only words
ever to pass between us, and I mean ever . . .
I just put my clothes back on and climb out the window
and sneak home to my house and think on it
and feel ashamed, though I don’t hate Maya anymore,
I kind of like her now because she was gentle and so soft
and actually beautiful in that butter light
and I want to go with her again and again, every night,
but I don’t, in fact I never even acknowledge her again
when she’s in the yard, and she never says a word
to anybody about what happened
and one day the house is empty, they’ve moved out,
the whole mad family, nobody knows where, they’re just gone
except for the bricks . . .
I’m relieved but regretful because I guess I treated her wrong
though she didn’t seem to mind and I figure
if they’d stayed I would climb back in soon enough and worse:
the thought that I’d be hoisting myself up
one or another window sill for the rest of my life.
Dixie
Dixie’s pure Cajun out of Bayou des Allemandes
where her family owns everything, oil money,
but she’s sweet, gracious, and makes sure her
copper red hair bounces when she talks, and she’s
animated, lively, innocent I guess, the kind of innocent
that’s been around, and she laughs a lot, smiles constantly,
but deep down she’s sad, you can feel it, and today
I bring her over to our family’s Sunday feast
at my grandmother’s, which I don’t usually do
with just anyone, so for now I’m into Dixie
and her eyes bulge when she beholds the food
on my grandmother Meem’s table because Meem
goes all out when I invite guests, and back then
most of my family is still alive and I will be lonely
when they’re not but what can you do? I’m close to Meem,
real close, but I know she judges the women
that come round and doesn’t like any of them
because I’m the crown prince according to her
though she’s really the boss . . . look at this:
a platter of bruschetta dripping with butter and
olive oil, the baked ham and pineapple, chickpea
soup, tagliatelle pesto, artichokes stuffed with
Progresso bread crumbs and oyster paste,
a bowl of fava beans with olive salad,
and for dessert we’ll have lemon ricotta cake
and caramel flan (the best in the world) . . .
we all dig in and Dixie eats daintily, exclaiming
with each bite how delicious though I happen to know
she prefers French to Italian, and I mean Cajun
French – they eat alligators down there – and speak
some twangy patois that sounds like Japanese.
But Dixie’s too hungry, she’s always hungry,
and I like her much, how could anyone not?
and she’s damned fine looking and drives
an MG convertible, and I don’t mean
by hungry greedy, there’s no greed in her soul,
she’s just famished, and she wants to eat me up too
and that might be fine if I felt like being eaten
and sometimes I do but right now I don’t
so it’s rough dealing with her and she never gets enough
of, well, you know what I’m talking about,
as if deprived her whole life, and I know it was
a messy divorce, she crushed when her husband
confessed he prefers men, which must have
bludgeoned her self-esteem, and I’m sorry for her
and want to help but I don’t want consumption
(and I don’t mean tuberculosis though I don’t want that
either), I mean being swallowed anew each day
and she can’t help it, she’s needy, and when I explain
it to her, she cries and promises she’ll change
but she can’t change because Dixie is Dixie
and I remember times when I felt the same need
and it’s desperate, scary, nobody likes it,
and in bed she almost begs, pleads, she’ll do
anything anybody wants, just love me, love me,
but love is a mystery and and you might
wind up with Medea or Medusa
while eager Dixie languishes on the sidelines,
still compliant, ready to forgive, and, hell, the girl
is rich and hot, so why the hesitation? Oh yeah,
I forgot to mention spumoni, we have that too,
and get this, hand-made by Meem. We’re full,
bloated, but Dixie accepts a second round of flan
and spumoni, and that’s what I mean, how is it
possible? She’s not fat, she’s lean and trim,
and that wavy hair bounces and she’s laughing
and telling Cajun stories and even my half senile
grandfather is charmed, charming, she’s charming,
though I know that after this grand lunch I’ll drive her
to the gazebo in Audubon Park and tell her
we need to see other people (that cruel line
which covers a lot of ground) and she will burst
into tears and I don’t want to use the word grovel
because I really like this girl and have a few needs
myself, many needs, and I wish Meem were still alive,
and the others too, and Dixie’s so ready to comply
and enthusiastic despite the telluric sadness
and it’s a mistake but maybe another place,
another time, because right now, at this instant,
I’m hungry for nothing.
Shelly
I’ve seen her around campus God knows, who hasn’t?
Skin tight stretch pants, golden hair curled at the tips,
too dazzling to approach but one day as I saunter
she flows in my direction and as we pass she winks!
Winks! so right off, I who cannot wink
say, hey, how you? and she drawls it out, I’m fiiiiiiiine,
how you? enough to reverse my direction
and walk with her to wherever she’s going which turns out
to be nowhere so I go nowhere too and after a while
ask if she wants to take a spin over to Audubon
by the lagoon and she, yes, and so we find my new Fiat Spider
which she loves and wind up sitting on the above ground
roots of an ancient live oak overlooking water coated with neon algae
and well you know what happens next, right there, outside, in public,
and I don’t care, it’s crazy, but oh the pulchritude of her
and her brashness, and people stroll by on the horse trail
and peer but she doesn’t stop and I don’t stop
and from there it’s a series of such oases, including her apartment
which is shabby, and turns out she has a three-year-old son
with hair poking straight up like bristles,
she only nineteen,
but not married, the guy absconded, and she’s not even a student,
she just hangs around Tulane and I presume she’s on the prowl
for guys, which she is,
and we’re on the sofa in her apartment when the son
bounces in sucking a binkie and stands and stares
and she tells him to go back to his room, it’s not lunch yet,
but he doesn’t, and she just continues with me,
the son permanently fixed, watching, and I’m disturbed
but not enough to stop . . .
and a few years later I meet her at a party, and she’s wearing
a fishnet top with no bra and looks better than ever and I’ve
grown a beard and wear Lennon glasses and we hook again
but now she’s a druggie, if she wasn’t back then,
and it’s like making love with a corpse
and yet she murmurs, a corpse cooing with I hope pleasure
but I figure this will go nowhere and my how we change
and as I slip out the door from the edge of my eye
I see her gulp another pill, and I cringe with sadness
for what a waste of one, let’s use the word fraught, fraught
with beauty, and brains too, and youth, yet so doomed.
A few more years along she poses for Playboy,
an issue I stash in my attic. And I still can’t wink.
Shawn
I’m sitting in the student union with a bunch
of dejected, grumpy fellow instructors
and every day we slouch and complain and bitch
about the condition of the world, the inequities,
our own sorry luck and poverty and whatever
and I feel old and dispirited and slide further
down my plastic lunch-room chair, stretch my neck
and sigh, and that’s exactly when I spot her,
California, straight wheat hair to her shoulders,
azure eyes, pimento halter, tight jeans,
the sexiest garment ever invented or imagined,
and she looks over, catches my glance and hooks into it
and I vaguely smile and she bestows a big one,
snow owl white teeth gleaming, even some gum line,
and she’s like halogen in this dim, gloomy place,
so I ask my colleagues who she is and they inspect slowly
and say they don’t know but she’s too dynamite
to even think about and I slam my palm onto the Formica
and cry, which is why you will forever ferment here
and get nowhere and suffer and moan and groan
your entire lives, and I rise from the table and head
for the chick, who looks anywhere from 22 to 25
(turns out 24) and notice she’s smoking
and though I’ve quit again barge right for her table
with about three or four other girls and an older woman
(is 24 girl or woman or chick or broad or what?)
and ask to bum both one of her Salems, menthol yuk!,
and a light from her nifty silver Bic
lying on the table like some amulet of splendor
and she taps the pack and out slides the white stick
and I hang it from my bottom lip and she clinks open
that Bic and lights my fire and I notice that her wrist
takes the form of a swan’s neck as she holds the flame
and I like this moment a lot and take it as an omen
and there’s an empty chair so I ask if I can join her
or them, though the others clearly have no use for me
but the feeling is mutual and our knees touch
as we chat and it turns out she’s married but her husband
who works as an assassin for the CIA is over in Thailand
or someplace like that slitting throats in dark alleys
and she, whose name is Shawn O’something Irish,
also informs me that he’s a black belt in karate
and I’m thinking this bodes no good and narrow entrance here
but she keeps touching my hand and smiling
and our knees now press steadfast together
and it’s something instant and beautiful and we both know it
and there’s voltage between us and oh man I want this woman
and no assassin’s going to divert this flow
because there’s too much current, and she says
she has a two-year-old son at home, which is across the river
in Algiers, and again, I tap the brakes but soon accelerate again
when I watch her stand to return her tray to the counter
and gaze at those jeans and when she turns, that face,
and I think that no man, even Adonis,
can ever come close to a woman’s beauty
which to me has always been a miracle, like finding gold
on the street, and one of the great gifts from the God
we have turned against, and she comes back to the table
in slow motion with molten fire flashing out of her body
and no doubt I’m a dead man.
