Kelley Square Love Song
I write a poem about eating eggs with you.
One month passes. You tell me you hate eggs—
even scrambled.
This woman half-waltzes, half-staggers
into the Vernon. She loves the word gorgeous.
She says gorgeous blonds & we three are gorgeous & this is a gorgeous day.
She has lost a youngest son, a house, land in County Cork.
They say. She wears a peignoir, black & pilled, like a noble obligation.
No panties. Pisses herself standing up.
I forgive your dislike of eggs, recall your fingers poised
before “Sweet Thing.” Before “Thunder Road.” Before “Dream Baby.”
Your perfect pitch: gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous
Ishmael Writes to Debbie Harry
Call me across ocean reveries
Call me from against the spiles
Call me at the Spouter-Inn & to the Whaling Church on time
Call me with side-lunging strides
Call me your top forty hit
Hummed through scrimshaw comb
Beat by pelican foot
Call me the 18th sexiest protagonist
Your blubber-boiler lover
Poet of the Horsehead Doldrums
Call me any time
Sea pen, your fiddle heart urchin
From CBGB’s toilet & graffitied brick
Call me Queequeg’s bitch
Je m’appelle Ishmael
In the voice of Sid Vicious
Call me a Ted Bundy escape plan
An outlier’s alibi
A Nantucket sleigh ride
Roll me in ambergris
From narcotizing sightlines
To Max’s Kansas City
(I’ll never get enough)
As Gericault was called to the Medusa
As Mocha stove the Essex
As dice of drowned men’s bones
Call me to the go-go, the Playboy mansion
Rockaway Beach or rock & roll high school
Before the trill of your high
Call me your number one
Jawbone prosthetic
Your heart of glass
Your new wave
Your Stubb or Starbuck or Flask
Your three-chord Tashtego
Your dreaming Sunday cannibal
Your 30,000 shark teeth
Your humpback rhyme-master
Breathe like a pod of right whales at midnight into my ear
I could be your stabilitis loci
Your garden of amorphous concealment
Your finny tribe or spiracle, your rapture
April Wedding at the Vernon Hotel
Plastic roses & chicken marsala
& yellow cake. A boombox
on the piano bench serenades us:
“Chantilly Lace” & “Put Your Head
on My Shoulder” & “Young Love.”
The “kids,” on the sly, buy PBR & say:
Our mother’s not a drinker. They’re all
Gray-suited & white socks, hanging
around Millbury Street, leaned up
against Narragansett & blond brick.
In her patent leather pumps & mid-60s,
the bride processes down the Ship
Room to “Let Me Entertain You.”
The groom is a mapmaker.
No dancing except for the toddlers.
They tell me later: Oh we’re wild.
Copyright © Lea Graham 2019
