“She had a white blouse, a blue skirt and legs.
Wow! And legs. So I says to myself,
‘I need to meet that broad.’”
John Rocchio,
one half of the world’s oldest married couple.
For my wife, Trinity.
Sometimes you might pray for someone
to come along & help you, to fill that
large hole in yourself, & maybe
this is a prayer said in
great desperation-
almost without hope of fulfillment.
Maybe those prayers are the most honest,
cause they are desperate, &
cause you came along:
A little tulip that escaped from
the floral-shop, & now is chicken-dancing,
nearly being pin-balled by
the various storefront windows-
the new album ads, the sandwhich deals,
the basement book sale-
a Kewpie doll on the lamb in a
pink-jacketed, fast-forwarded blur
past me, while I arrange
the final cigarettes in a couple
ventriloquist dolls mouths.
Part 2.
I saw a 9-11 documentary the other night,
& something that stuck in me, like
extra-large pins in a voodoo doll, or
a myopic acupuncturist, were the
last conversations loved ones had.
For example, the male passengers on
That poor plane headin’ towards the
White-House.
They knew what had to be done,
& they called their wives, &
said their good-byes.
Imagine those final words.
You’ve got two minutes to say everything,
& what’ll you say? I love you.
I love you, & I’m glad we found
each other.
You’ve made me very happy.
I want to treat every day I’m with you
like that last conversation.
Part 3.
I was, before you came along, a
zombie tele-marketer sellin’ valentine cards
to anyone who’d take ‘em.
I don’t regret meeting & mingling,
like shell-less hermit-crabs on the
edge of an ocean, with all the
women I knew before you.
I wasn’t ready for you, & you weren’t
prepared for me.
Our hearts needed tune-ups.
The lassoing attempts by rough-draft,
amateur mormon-wannabes to win us
over, & convince us to accept
ideas against our hearts-
Well, that junkyard behavior wears on
your soul like refrigerator mold.
But we did find each other,
& then we started to walk.
Part 4.
The walks were somethin’.
The walks are what bear-trapped
my heart- if I were a bower-bird,
I would’ve just started to take
Rumba lessons, & just begun
to litter my place with all the
dumpster-picked jewels.
The early courtship.
We never paid much attention to
the Fisher-Price houses along those
green back-streets.
I remember focusin’ on the
different shrubs & bushes that stretched beyond
the fences & gates- like prisoners
with their arms between bars-,
& the puddles on the sidewalk
with dead earthworms, the victims
of a disastrous family vacation, &
the words we paddle-balled
back & forth.
Thoreau mentioned the magnified importance
of words when chattin’ with his pal
across Walden pond.
I say there is a tighter intimacy, like
the blood vessels shared by
Siamese twins, when two people are
walking, & just allowin’ thoughts
to come & go,
no encoding & decoding,
no complications or translations,
just honest talk of two people
getting’ to know each other.
And the smells, I also remember the smells.
Wet smells of Spring being squeezed through
a strainer, & you get all the flowers, soil, birds,
grass, alive-ness of everything.
like a garden, my grandfather’s garden
the morning after a rain-fall.
The bean-sprouts of love.