It's Still Rock-n-Roll To Me:
        Monogamy in a Story

There’s no place to store a look like that--
No locked box to place it in for safekeeping.
So I absorb it, the first water of spring
soaking me, a reservoir.

The last drop lingers like a parted sea, a miracle
but so well published the magic blurs.
Desire scatters like cottonwood down
under a rising westerly.

I want sun to mean the garden and me a peony
instead of only, always
the rake, the shovel, the wheelbarrow
and it works, some days, or close to:

like today as I lounge in the sun of this affection,
a watering can curved over love
as if I can quench any thirst and maybe
I can.

It reminds me of childhood summers:
the corruption of those first concerts, paperclip necklaces,
too much eye-liner, “Sex as a Weapon” before
we knew anything about either.   Riding

bikes to the corner store for caramels—
Another long day, much like the last,
but each with the certainty that long after the tongue lies bare,
what’s sweet will linger.


                    Published 2011 in Quercus Review

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