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You Can Be the Subject of Wild Admiration in Ten Days
You could be terribly well put together.
The land has an eye to you. You’re the very spirit of geography.
Don’t fidget. Don’t go striding above me, air spider.
Sit and talk away the evening. It’s so hot. When you spread
your robe,
It’s so hot.
You’re the very spirit of occasions do skateboard about me.
Brilliant. Intensely desirable. Are you listening?
Your lipstick like a watermelon split open on the rocks.
Don’t fidget. Say what you feel. You’ll like it.
Sustained notes, however, are out: their age, size, hunting dogs,
And code locations all dropped down
Like the hanged, whose many friends
Run to tug on their legs, they’re that kind. Go
with feathers in the mouth, like the cat. It’s called
The dialectic of distinction. No, no, it’s not for the lute
to repeat.
As I was saying, you’re the understated darling of distances.
Eve. Evening. Evocative. Sit here with the bucket in your lap,
Hork if you must, but hush your sobbing;
Your chair throbs like a vibrator.
If my breath stinks of a hired gun, love me for it,
I could clear the prairie of hostiles.
You wander off? After all the work I’ve done?
I’ve met up with your kind before. I attract it, even.
Anyway, earth colors don’t look good on you,
Do you know? And the land, that fetishist, brings a hole
The exact size of your treacherous foot.
And after I had you where you smelled so good.
—Cal Bedient
Cal Bedient’s
most recent book of poems is The Violence of the Morning.
Originally published
in the April/May 2003 issue of Boston Review
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