Coming Home

 

Reclining Figure 80 x 60 cm c/o Karin Goeppert

BEAUTY

You deep read some pretty girl’s mangled syntax

as if it were a dissertation on the Metaphysical Poets.

Alone, the spectacle of her thighs invites sonnets and arias.

Curled up on her lap are your dirtiest thoughts,

brimming with ambition. But instead of making your day

she makes you put snow tires on her car, a cute

little import, and says “Thanks, “dad,” ” as she hands you ten bucks.

The mushrooms are ravishing: freckled, tinged ochre, shapely.

Some of them look like very attractive underwater creatures.

But only the reckless would eat them. The ignorant

or self-destructive. Just look at them. And what of those

other “shrooms”, the dried-out kind locked up in a baggy, which

if they could sing would sound just like the lovely Grace Slick?

I’m looking at a post-modern

cave painting, some interestingly orchestrated

slabs of color, or I’m looking at a sheepish Ulysses

drag a half-empty wine skin into his wife’s bed; she stops

curling her eight pound novel, smiles, flexes, reluctantly reassures,

“Of course I missed you, you big pussy.” Now, that’s pretty.