End of the Weekend

So much did he dread returning tonight
he started a fight before she drove him
back to the ward. He resurrected the word fame.
For him the hole cards might never turn up.
Even the deck could be gutted:
jacks and queens but kings and aces nowhere,
and one too many jokers to foul any hand:
those standing pat, those going for broke.
I love you believing in me, he said,
please don’t put the curse of failure on me.

She didn’t get it and said so.
He snapped, You know how far I have to go
to learn to read "Graves at Mukilteo,"
their headstones. I work my ass off, Lovely,
and all I have to show is a rag hand
of clubs, hearts, diamonds, and spades,
completely worthless, but who in this place
at the table knows when or what to bid . . .
Not Danny St. Clair,
who died holding a losing hand.

In "A Guide to Dungeness Spit" my first teacher
celebrates this singular place
with ships, lovers, and mountains. No, Lovely,
I can’t recite it.
I may never comprehend the beauty
you seek in peaks and rivers.
Teach me, take me there, show me all you love.
I know nothing but this city,
and then only streets where no flowers grow
that are not condemned.

(26 February 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday

she drove east
into the mountains

she wanted to fish
he wanted to read

they would share
something new

she never read
anymore

he never had
fished

she listened,
he watched

wind foam
the currents

(25 February 2012: II)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday

Truth was
she cared
he be happy,
that's the fame she meant.

Saturday,
the attack on three airfields
near Havana,
by Monday
becomes known
as the Bay of Pigs.

We know so little
immediately.
Time will fix that.
Gusanos living stateside
recall JFK embarrassed,
weeping privately,
steeling his nerves
for the onslaught,
having honored Ike's misbegotten CIA
plan passed to him, standard American
Exceptionalism.

Lovely Melindra takes Bobby to town
and gets him drunk
on Jackson Street, then Pike,
Bobby buttonholing various drunks:
I'm an archaeologist digging up Seattle!
Some guy butts in:
How far down do you have to go?

He saw
her eyes
were turquoise,
sky blue mixed with green;
her blonde hair dyed,
earth brown at the root.

Home, she kept him awake
long enough to please her
and gave him a dream
to sleep off
into tomorrow.

(25 February 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Dream Swallowing Dream

1.

Relapse
is the word occurs to him.
No point writing this one
if he only dreams
he gave Bonnington
to give Ripley
his collected works
so far. While he waits
he writes the second dream,
which he will keep from the doctors.

Anna and Paul pick him up
and from their house he calls Melindra,
addressing her as Lovely.
He could be back in his first dream.
She calls him Honey, a smile in her voice,
adds she may come early if that's okay.
It is. While he waits, he reads over what
he was playing in his first dream.
He asks Paul if he has a spare clarinet.
Paul says: Yes, yours.

He wets the reed.
His lips feel like rubber.
Once he begins remembering,
he's disappointed,
riffing on a score he had to write down
to believe.
He remembers what he cannot play now.
You will, Paul says, take it with you.
Lovely arrives and puts it in her car
without asking, and he feels no need to explain.

2.

Over dinner Anna asks Melindra
why she wants to go to med school,
learns of the abortion, the brush with death,
the womb removed so she can live
to become a doctor to help women like her.

Anna says she wanted a child. No way you can,
the doctor said, you can always adopt.
Paul shifts the subject. What will Bobby do?
Lovely says he needs to become famous.
She's so serious, her eyes like razors,

Bobby says, If I were Richard Hugo,
I'd work at Boeing writing to order
so someday soon I'd have a book in hand,
the poker-table version of A Run of Jacks,
"Adventures Between Danny and Henrietta."

3.

That should give the two human being in this world
who love him and therefore love her
grist for the mill of marriage and kindness
they would winnow from the wheel of their grief.
So Bobby tells Melindra once they arrive home.

Her home. The second story of her house.
Tomorrow they will live downstairs. For now
she does to him exactly what she did
in one of his two dreams, did what he did not do.
They sleep inside the curve of their bodies.

In the morning he shares with her his dreams,
unfolding the first dream that he wrote down,
then follows it with the other two,
first what it was like to wake, then the second dream.
Will she say he's into wish-fulfillment?

(24 February 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Friday

He's asking Bonnington for a moment
to show him the dream
so far
but no farther, how could he? Wait a bit,
mouth of a horse, drill a hole in the floor,
ride out.

Bonnington's wanting Bobby to give him one
he'll show Ripley:
upstairs you'll find your readers.
Bobby's gathering dark flowers,
politely requesting something empty
from who's behind the plexiglass.

Looks like Lovely Melindra's car:
He's sleeping in her bed?
She's doing with him what he loves,
does she? now blue eyes
reflect her blue dress,
driving, head in her lap, loving her there.

At the door Anna's saying,
You're my guinea pigs tonight
for a dish I want to call Beef Griot,
the flesh of the mind grinding out stories
Paul's reading aloud. Could that be Mozart?
Bobby's going to tell him, I'm dreaming.

If this's Friday he has till Monday,
when he's going upstairs to meet Ripley
and his mucky mucks.
Bonnington says no one works here like him.
Bobby says, I didn't know, I don't care,
I do only what I need to do
to stay sane despite the madness
my words may conceivably convey.

Melindra lets him suck her lovely tits
like some pony fresh from the womb.
She turns him upside down and has him do
what they both love.
They orgasm, his and hers oozing out
to roam the pastures of their flesh.
She asks why he's silent. My writer's bloc,
you know how I like to beg off.

(23 February 2012: II)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Waking

He woke and wrote what he could remember.
He never dreamed when he slept here.
Now he wanted to dream more.
He felt aggrieved somehow and tore
the paper from the typewriter
without looking at the black marks.
Her eyes were sky blue. He kissed her ears
everywhere, one then the other.
There were words for sounds he never
heard himself play before.
It was some time since he played clarinet.
How could he pick it up and play like that
now composing on the pulse of an hour?
Much simpler to keep dreaming.

(23 February 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Friday Night at Paul & Anna's

She wore a light blue dress she said she saved
for special occasions:
This was one.
He nuzzled her behind one ear as she drove;
Lovely said nothing,
he kept on.
Your clarinet’s been oiled, Paul volunteered.
They had beef griot,
Anna called it.
After dinner they drank brandy from a snifter,
sharing his with Lovely.
He took up the clarinet, moistening the reed,
then blowing off-key and running the scale,
relaxing into a slow tongue
making the reed squall
before trilling to run the scale again,
the fast climb from the lower register,
and from high the fall, full-throated descent.
He made what he played become a refrain.
Such was the melody he searched for
that when an hour was gone he found the song
and felt a quiver, her blue eyes aglow.
Left alone, Lovely kissed him a long while.
He said Now, now,
meaning, More . . .

(22 February 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander