The Man with the Broom

All summer, wind irritated jacarandas
while sunlight continued to butter them.
People had vaginas but didn't take them out.
Outhouses contained everybody's irony, I faced
the years head of me like slightly dry air,
and wisteria, and light, and the present:
a cool, clean hand offering a piece of fruit.
At a bar called The Spike, I ate soup and bread
as pages started falling from my favorite books.
How could they have fallen so quietly?
You said, welcome, come in, sit, but I stood
at your door, ashamed of my homemade clothes

I saw you as a crow, wings folded in readiness.
You were reading a thin white paperback, a single
candle drawn on its cover, and you sang
me the line you had just read -
"Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight..."
We made love on the hostess' couch
right as the last guests were leaving, about
two-thirty on a late September morning.
I felt we were sneaking into a coat-locker
at Hidden Farms Elementary with Stuart Little:
I felt spiders scoot across the wall above our heads.

We should get a broom, I say, but the webs' prism colors
make visible the surface of the air, as though a membrane
protected us from whatever waited outside it.
I want to sleep naked next to that membrane
in a secret Vegas of music and dreams. But the light
has shifted, and the man with the broom has arrived.

Copyright 2006 James Cushing
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