At LAX, wandering among lost luggage and children in sunglasses like flocks of dwarf directors, I should have known him under the disguise of an old friend. Despite the corduroy jacket and prep-school tie, when I kissed that mouth, clasped in its parenthetical expression of temper by the lines from nose to mouth, as an old Catholic girl, I should have recognized the aftertaste of a god. He stayed three days and watched the Marineland killer whale snatch mackerel from a woman's mouth, an old man vacuum castle stairs in a miniature golf course at midnight. My days were cluttered with half similes - always the caboose and nothing @3like@1 to hitch it to. Until he checked in for smoking and the window seat, I didn't recognize him wearing my friend like a glove. But it seemed appropriate, after his other human loves - the unfaithful lion wrestler and frigid Cassandra - that it was us, the Sapphos, blue-stockinged office temporaries wearing our ink like eyeshadow, who were faithful to the last stanza, where I left him in LAX waiting for a flight to some other woman poet among palm trees decked out in wreaths of another god. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HAPPY WIND by WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES THE SNUG LITTLE ISLAND by THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN OF MAIDENS' PRAISE: AN INVOCATION by SAINT ALDHELM SONNET: 15 by RICHARD BARNFIELD HINC LACHRIMAE; OR THE AUTHOR TO AURORA: 11 by WILLIAM BOSWORTH |