Riverbend

If there were lights there would be sound, but the night hushed by clouds
is beached on a reef in the turn of Riverbend where the breakwater runs,
or would if there were an ocean the water could reach at the end of its flow.
There are women and men in town but boys and girls are more its style,
especially the high-breasted, narrow-waisted, long legg’d lassies with nails
painted red glowing in the white lights of the Saturday night restaurant.
And he is but a lad, this one, his eyes imagine more than could be there,
his hands want to reach his crotch under the table to masturbate his wand,
he is that young but old enough to compel the blood to gorge the passage.
This is to say he is a boy himself with the nocturnal proclivities of the men
strutting like roosters among the women who would be wives in the dream
of complexity and consternation albeit with pleasure a brief complaisance.
There is one who owns this café whose son is a growing bull and his horns
are equal to the fierce need to propel himself against the warring bodies
on a field surrounded by fanatics who wish only to see the kill and victory. 
Jim Dills fathered Jim Dills, whom no one has the audacity to call Junior,
the boy, his father calls him when he is hurdling through the opposing team
who fall like Achaeans on the hundred yard battlefield, or is it a century?
It is the river naming Riverbend refusing its Indian name for the Sparta
where children were trained, unlike here, where fathers become spectators.
Only he knew Emily Esquivel who was her lover and would die very young.
She was quiet and beautiful with her body already woman to his manhood.
He took her willingly down to the shore of the river bending into embrace.
She would do there things he imagined were done only for him and for now
and alone would know when next she brought him down to her nakedness
and encouraged his rut with her soft hands guiding his tyrannical bone
inside–her arching, the heaving, his rocking ride with the river’s slow glide
and only their bare skin afloat, only his body’s need to become Emily’s will,
the way the carp rippled brown as refuse through the water beside them.
Who would know what became of her when he died? Who could you ask? 

(26 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander