Escape pentameter -

Over the lines,
her voice reverberates with Ithacan weather,
with pre-Easter evenings when the parties built high.
Wendy calls me,
over and over,
and as I force the flavor of grass and the smell of sun from my mouth,
the Persian New Year begins again.

Months in Kaske’s lectures on verse form,
skipping classes, showing late;
eating fried mushrooms at the Nines.
Our history was sudden and gangling,
a giraffe set loose in a small park.
But Wendy had hair like morning through gauze,
piles of invite and apples and curl.

Vodka. Cheap, mixed with lime, with soda;
a sheath dress the color of smoked plums,
heat that flooded the cotton on her skin
as we stumbled from the dance floor, brushed by the pool.
The flow of Spenserian stanzas clotted,
her Victorian skin a vessel
for my tentative touch, for my tongue’s passage.
Wendy knew the way a man’s body moved,
she found the crevasse for her lush,
soap-scented need.

We promised inconsistencies:
she would make pesto. I would treat her well.
It rained on us,
on the streets,
on her pale, freckled shoulders.
Her eyes trailed over the edge of my lips.

Later,
we returned to our ways.
Delegating places in life for each other,
staying “in touch”.
Sometimes, when she laughs long-distance,
I can smell her once-vibrant arousal,
and lilacs in rain.




GLS
3.9.92