|
POETRY BY ELEANOR LERMAN
LIKE LEE AND MARINA
Listen, you’re too young. And I am not as interesting anymore,
not in the way you’d like. Everything I’d say would
sound
like I was teaching you and any kind of sex you want, I’ve
had it. I can do it now and still listen to the radio.
So is this
where you want to go with me? Think about it. Think hard
because time is like a rifle shot and you can’t stop it, sweetie,
not even for me. Besides, I’m armed and ready for something,
finally, to happen in this life. Like Lee, I’m pacing,
pacing,
thinking it may all be lies, thinking something terrible had better
happen to wake me up. Like Marina, I am perplexed by what
I do not have. August on Magazine Street: the heat lives on
all night,
the morning hoists a blistered sun that rots the flowers in the yard,
the vegetables in their bins. And now this killer season lasts
the whole year long. Listen, listen: even the unborn babies
howl
So do you wonder that I am consumed by culture, that even
crazy, dying, I want more? You will follow this way, too,
walking the streets of your home town sick with desire,
renting rooms in silent hotels, carrying basins of ice back to
your bed. Evil days will arrive like arsonists to burn you
down and I can’t help you, baby, not in this incarnation
Then what can we do together? Stalk the years, wearing the
assassin as our true nature. Like Lee and Marina, let us remain
unknowable, a team with secret motives shared in the dark. You
hold the rifle and I will take your picture, then claim that we remember
nothing except the pain of living, and how we never wanted it to end
Eleanor
Lerman is the author of three books of poetry: Armed Love,
(Wesleyan University Press, 1973), which was nominated for a National
Book Award, Come the Sweet By and By, which won the inaugural
Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press in 1975 and,
most recently, The Mystery of Meteors (Sarabande Books, 2001).
She has also contributed to two nonfiction books that resulted from
America's Most Wanted: No Mercy (Pocket Books, 1998) and Public
Enemy (Pocket Books, available August 2001); both books are by John
Walsh, written with her brother, Philip Lerman. She is a lifelong
denizen of New York City.
Back
to Home | Back
to Poetry
|
More BMR Authors' Books:
Making Scenes
by Adrienne Eisen
Small Boat with Oars of Different Size
by Thom Ward
Viking Brides
by Richard Cumyn
Interesting Monsters
by Aldo Alvarez
The Gauguin Answer Sheet
by Dennis Finnell
Rosicrucian in the Basement
by Robert Sward
Bloodroot, the book and Bloodroot, the excerpt
by Aaron Roy Even
|