You are my sunshine. Break of day,
You rise in the east and move across
The house, setting your sites to match.
Night spreads without a sense of loss.
Though light and heat both fade away,
And parallel lines don't care to meet,
We stoke our own invested heat.
Don't tell me nothing gold can stay.
Don't say a word. Let's wish and watch.
Imagine growing up in Troy,
N.Y., and Helen is your name.
You have no choice, obliged to find
A Menelaus right next door,
Or who'd be spurned? A Joe? A Ted?
I don't think so. In Paris, Mo.,
Abscond with some old mogul's wife,
Hide her behind your stuccoed walls,
Crouching for years and years and years,
Until she has grown hoarse with scorn,
All attitude? The men of Troy
Hector their bonne wives endlessly,
The voice of Nestor wafting in.
This appeared in Poetry Proper.
This is a house without chalcedony
Or Andamooka opals, and it deems
Its seizure insecure. Hawks veer away
To overfly somebody else's house.
This house is what it is, is what it is.
You want to meet us? We share a single bath,
Not privacy. Our calendar misquotes
In scarlet letters Make your life sublime
Use Rapid Sands. We never leave the room
For grave emergencies. Our motto is
A tramp stamp on the lady of the house,
Her fine embroidered sacroiliac,
Hunker Down, which seems not to overstate,
And understatement is a way of life.
Why, there is a bone here after all; a mole
Has left his skull, a warrior's helmet toy,
For Spike to crunch and play with. This is a house
Without a porphyry tub or sisal strings
To anchor it, and someday it will leave.
