My gorgeous friend, a coal mine blonde,
—eyes alive for the underground,
hair dusted black at the seams—writes
"watching my wife" sex stories
for a pornsite, while I work at Petco,
assistant manager of fish & lizards.
Some might say we're both fisted,
setting our road ahead on flameshot
and mire, that quirkiness and orgy
have no set potential for fashion.
We dream a sex fog ruminating
from nightclubs and pool halls,
truck cabs, patios and ballfields,
until there isn't much not in touch
with another, while we make love
in our pointy-toed shoes, digging
the mattress back to wild cotton
because, sir, that's what we are,
that's what we do, we take a world
narrow as a band of desert blacktop,
and we stumble around, witches
and satyrs, divine as every horizon,
fucking all the wild groves back up,
back into place. And we don't need
your angryscared idea of water,
typed out strict in irrigation ditches.
We got spirits yelling through a TV
set in heaven, or some other place,
and we think they tell us what to do.
We think it rains right where we walk,
while most everybody's lost dry right
where they stand, waiting on appliances
and newstalkers, immobile, dizzyblind
save for the blinking lights, buttons,
perfect hair and trained seal diction.
Well, we don't like the obvious colors
you all chose for traffic lights, and
we don't like your lazy saving grace,
the bleak hair combed in dead crop fields,
your eerie way of neither no nor yes
when we ask you home to get your ankles
in the air and your fingers deep involved.
Ah, this quest through dented compact cars,
wrecked apartments with storied carpets,
quizzical and concerned faces, the anger
undirected, just general pissedoffness
that we wait and wait and wait in beds
and torn car seats safe without light
outside the nightclub or behind the 7-11.
I'll know when I know—it ain't easy—
just as chieftain trees wait in the woods
without complaint, in magic's own time.
It is not me to stand willow to the wind
singing of shock, and ache, compromise,
for the timid little sprites holed inside
the biggest, starkest trees, long safe
beneath rings and rings of pulp and bark,
reminding them of the confusing quirk
of life that cores each puzzle piece,
till death turns all merely into matter.
It is me, the tree that never yet budged,
choosing soon to step between the willow
and this brutal air, with all I've learned,
to stop the arctic breath, now till spring,
a redwood that's made up its mind:
Today is no longer left to the weather,
but a land where willows are promised
the distance, and grow to claim the sky.
In the crowded forest, it is all and only
up to me, to use my Irish roots to walk.
Tell my friend, "Get dressed, we're going."
Then, I'll learn to talk in such a way—
not quite curse, not quite enchantment—
but in the remarkable strength of love,
until each storm is mine, and straplings
find the faith this living earth is theirs,
in peace, for another billion wild years.
For what does a tree know, but to grow
impossibly stronger in the service of life.
© John Kilroy