Going With Elliott
In
the morning, nerves crook like they always
And birds sing dirty again, uninterrupted by
Trucks charging double sound below their canopies
I can’t decide if the room is the height of heaven
Or, with these low-slung thoughts, an abyss
I smell
more like my grandpa every day, while
On the coffee table, a borrowed map I splayed out
With a glossy sky--exotic and crisp--goes limp
After a humid night, draping like a tablecloth
And I wonder if I’ll be punished by the library
We
will go there, this new woman in my life
This place with border crossings and altitude
With the dead curled into pits in the arid hills
And as interesting as the trip folds out to be
All I can imagine are her breasts in the Andes
Gusts
make leaves quake on the Fourth of July
Will we get on for weeks in travel’s centrifuge
As we do in clumps of live and wayward hours?
Lastly, will the branches of another continent
Chirp as singlemindedly, beckoning the hoary day?
And birds sing dirty again, uninterrupted by
Trucks charging double sound below their canopies
I can’t decide if the room is the height of heaven
Or, with these low-slung thoughts, an abyss
On the coffee table, a borrowed map I splayed out
With a glossy sky--exotic and crisp--goes limp
After a humid night, draping like a tablecloth
And I wonder if I’ll be punished by the library
This place with border crossings and altitude
With the dead curled into pits in the arid hills
And as interesting as the trip folds out to be
All I can imagine are her breasts in the Andes
Will we get on for weeks in travel’s centrifuge
As we do in clumps of live and wayward hours?
Lastly, will the branches of another continent
Chirp as singlemindedly, beckoning the hoary day?