A cranky child curled in my lap, the love poem whines, drags grimy fists at my blouse. I push her away, try to distract her with a caterpillar's hump on the sooty windowsill to amuse her out of my mind thinking that love poems like other children have fantasy playmates, inventions they puppet to the actions of their desire. But she doesn't want that. A child sprawled on the living-room floor, she wants to draw pictures without the necessity of narration or connection, to make a crayon present for a guest. A Brooklyn balcony seat, my third-floor window looks down ten years ago on a Hopper scene - a young fireman, his hair morning slick, and the blond bounce of his young woman's curls. Their voices are lost in the traffic but the texture of the basket on her arm - its simple cross-hatchings of straw - is a close ripple of weave in the May sun. From my car window last year in a green corral shadowed by the San Francisco peaks, a white horse and a dog - pale neck arched down, dark one curved up - gallop together the wind of their joy. Having started from Brooklyn and left, her pictures return, with the last one, to the dusk of my Brooklyn street where the windows make their slide of home on the wall of darkness, and she curls in my lap, content in our lighted frame having given her pictures to the guest who says he'll stay. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...MINIVER CHEEVY by EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON BIVOUAC ON A MOUNTAIN SIDE by WALT WHITMAN MODERN MANNERS by MARY (CUMBERLAND) ALCOCK THE GODODDIN: CARADOC by ANEIRIN A MARLOW MADRIGAL by JOSEPH ASHBY-STERRY LOVE AND THE MUSE by MATHILDE BLIND |