For Dawn Ananda

As she held scissors, stabbed my chairs,
Left a hole for no good reason cause I
Couldn’t say no, that she is so darling, this
She knows as I blow smoke, and her face was,
And is, unreachable, a kind of moon, a fright,
A graveyard orphan’s tired lament for a kind
Of nakedness she won’t allow, not to me,
Though we tried, my hands on her stomach,
Teeth bared, it was that kind of holocaust,
Afternoon sunlight slanting onto the porch, her
Mug some semblance of calm, I jumped a yard,
Thinking I’d won her at last...

And so the table unfolds before us
Ashtray eye-beams and saucer-eyed sentences,
Coats put on for the chill November wind
That reaches around, a kind of strong-armed
Curse, an anti-benediction, as if some ruddy
Pope put a backwards rhyme on our spoons so
That nothing could ever be born from this tryst,
But a moon-child cast up into the stratosphere,
Without reason for leaving the ground...