**Poem: "Gazebo for Two Anarchists"

 

Gazebo for Two Anarchists

                                             -after Storm King Arts Center, NY

I wait hours for you,

winding along the 84s and 87s,

your mother's 3rd hand relay

of your whereabouts as reassurance,

that and acting Noguchi pit

in the granite peach,

reclining in the burning ivy with

Moore's iron maiden,

prickled to anxious by

Nevelson's poky house of cards.

You push your voice like

a gun to my back,

sneak from behind as I

ring up your mother one more time,

the sun sinking straight

into the wary horizon.

"Put down that phone!"

I obey; you never have to beg.

My life starts each year in September,

shuffling thru colonial leaves,

damp autumn winds

piercing china skies,

clouds moving quicker than stars.

We met in July, at the start of the eighties,

bought matching dresses at the foreign booth

to burn Sinatra, listen to incense

creak on the metal dorm sills in.

Your husband hangs between us now,

beloved by proxy,

English cowboy met

on another range.

The moon shone on all of us,

but the love fell on you.

Long picnic shadows

join us at the tables, with

bare turkey and cheese on wheat.

I have a photo of myself

dangling from a pointed cannon;

later, I would stumble on an old god

at a mountainside lodge,

my lips melting into his hundred apologies,

soon to be multiplied.

You and I chat up mothers, molehills

in that metal gazebo,

as if the normal setting for us

was this spare trolley.

Anarchists? I'd like to think

our love lives beyond the system,

our lives apart from cocktails and terror.

You shine rocks with your fingertips,

mold gold into the things we need.

I write it all down,

Basho of the Hudson,

hoping straw sandals, orchids for laces

will be enough.

The trolley stays as we part,

twilight bellowing in the distant space.

Gazebo tea-talk lingers

on my windburned mouth.

The mountains stay behind.

CAR  4/14/98