Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE COVER OF MARS, by JANE MILLER


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE COVER OF MARS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The lucille ball - desi arnaz hour concludes
Last Line: I give you back my heaven. You're all in my head.
Subject(s): Popular Culture - United States


The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz hour concludes
with a Fix beer slipping my neighbor's grip.
Again he will sleep on the cot in the vestibule
under a pile-up of stars. Now he shouts
at his ignorant self in Greek, and his wife.
Now that I am returned from the taverna
like change from an empty, I lie in the amphitheatric
vibrations of the alphabet of
international report and arthritic snore
pelting the strip of beach invisibly like moon drag,
white on white on decanted white forever,
having wandered out of three ouzos with dinner, wondering
whether peace with the Turks lasts
because war with one another continues
mentally, calibrated astronomically,
whether people's hearts are too sore to care
to reclaim territory, or whether I have not listened
or lived in such a way that I can understand
a strange country's fate, let alone
my own, wracked with mosquito at this juncture
of adult love, from this as from any altar, better
than from the shot of morphine
the doctor administers the last time
I freaked, cramped, I can blame
myself in your presence and claim this room
never had to do with my life, someone's
rotten smiling teeth above an undershirt like sailboat
mirrored upside down in sea, lit in the courtyard
by the cerebral cortex of ultrablue cable television,
Lucille in flames, addressing Ethel's willing
slow take, the enormous wash-out of beach, weed,
sea, sea, and sea, so that I can remember
my center, backyards of beautiful barns and junked cars,
the America I lose you in when we return,
with precision, and with my usual splash
as from outer space, years later, alone, I land
up on a given afternoon crossing
the Mississippi into Galesburg, Illinois, through
Carl Sandburg Drive, past cemented Penney's,
singing down Main with the church
bells of an historic cyclone, as one remembers
an old life lifted from an old notebook, as obvious
as our souls drifting the coast off Mars
or worse, your face on the cover of Mars.
I give you back my heaven. You're all in my head.





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