One spring I left my small children behind
For a giant poster of Oscar Wilde,
Pennyroyal in the kitchen,
And cigarettes on the windowsill
Discoursing on the death of the sublime.
How could they compete
With Dead Don't Dance, potato glasses,
An enormous bag of Vidalia onions?
That's what happens when doors open,
The pathos of the lonely finds an owner,
Like an orphaned kitten or a 19th century ghost,
Victorian as only Lovegrove, wrought-iron laced
And cobblestoned, could conjure.
We spent hours exquisitely filling each others arms
As if there was no other world, because there wasn't,
Only early Tom Waits demo tapes
And a dog-eared copy of The Banquet Years,
Which answered any questions that blew in
Through the stone-dead city windows
Until the sirens came, and everyone found out,
And, just as silently, nothing was ever the same again.
Sick of dead literature, she opened the windows when I left
To the hellfire of a Baltimore July.
