Ease and Her Wanderings

 

She doesn’t drink

Milk when a full moon is coming

Or feel driven

to give money to the public radio

When they ask for it twice yearly

 

 

the campus oaks droop the same in the

gloom of the rain on Saturday anyway

As though they were an older people heavy with

their wash in some river

And heavy with their troubles in the river

And anxious with their kids safe on the bank

Of some river

 

They know the water rises.

That moon changes water:

 

Her favorite day is Sunday,

Some last sweaty hours to spend in thirst

Hungover at festival graveyards

Which really are just the bones of the thing,

barricades and tenantless tents,

Or otherwise at the Jewish graveyard

During the kind of the morning hours that seem

to creak

and where they leave rocks on the headstones

so you can see how long they’ve been there

By the quality of how

worn and smooth they are,

 

These tokens likely being a gesture to show

that the passage of time might also make things

fine and rare

instead of just ruinous

 

Midweek then, at the bar, when she stalks up

And curls one arm about your

Back and moves the other

In front with a drink you know

That it’s definitely a brutal hand she's

put there to your belly

 

But one that is worthwhile

Because evil is not simple,

And because the town is most

Comely when it’s lonely,

 

And because like the water she has

That same quality of being

unavoidable