Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TROIKA FOR LOVERS, by JANE MILLER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TROIKA FOR LOVERS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: His gait is like he's got a cricket in his shoe
Last Line: But the dream that produced it.
Subject(s): Gays & Lesbians; Men; Relationships; Triplets


His gait is like he's got a cricket in his shoe;
he's lost his morning-coat.
The odd one is Mandelstam himself
laundered with a queer name in his tale.
It's the spineless and heroic victim
of The Double, Dostoevsky's own
equivalent for Gogol's civil servant.
They claim us in their common round
like song from a Victrola
against the beefy railroad prose
which shuttles generations
like Jews from one zone to the next.

We strut Commercial St. to see La Cage aux Folles,
male lovers triumph over a cultural official;
nonetheless, his daughter marries their son.
We're alone in time.
It's our human gait.
On the beach a father taught his boy
not to catch the lines flyfishing.
Sand forms and unsettles like soldiers.
Movements may not thrust
opposites together, but a man with a strange ear might
rest his sunken face perpendicular to an era.
The sunny war lyric of Theodorakis
you honor in you new art, synthesizer.

It's a simple enough act, to bow a cymbal,
if it occurs to you
as music. We empower the odd
number we couple in, three,
cacophonous and far from the possible
which was limited and contradictory.
Men complete themselves or live on
animals. The orderly and familiar
sea drives the new gravel to lyric.
Full moon over a fast ship.
Sometimes it's as close as a string of sleep in the eye
no one else can remove, and as silent --
tradition, nothing in itself
but the dream that produced it.





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