The Poet Reads To An Audience of Women

by

Published June 16th, 2008

I like to watch

him woo them:

the women like

beautiful trees

in rows. His

voice has hands,

or his voice

is a tendril,

or a tongue,

it’s an ambient

kiss,

a climate exactly

right – to each

woman an air

made of kindness.

To each the kind

of love she

believes she under-

stands, this love

like lost

love. It is always

the same: already,

you see,

they miss him.

***

THE HEART STOPS

Epitaphic Notes for the Dead

I

Sorrow a trigger and

Only a thought Mike put down the gun

I take the ring and all I don’t know

I wear them

(for Mike Singleton)

II

Sad gray man rubble behind

A wall lonely thing can you shoot

Your way daddy out of this

(for Arthur Earl Jones)

III

And how’d it feel to fly

The ocean waving and finally

In your good brown damn virgin suit

Michael aside they missed you

(for Peter Linfante)

IV

Blonde life long as your belt shit-

Assed pump station her on the other side oh

John the wrong sun must have chased you

Down that window

(for John Wojtecki)

V

Wisht so hard the angels came

How doll is your black white

Red settling on them?

(for Myrt Moran)

VI

Ash and no going back I

Am bewildered by the lack of you damn heart

Stopping then stopping again in the end

(for Louise Argiroff)

***

DIRE SAPPHICS ON LOVE’S NATURE AND THE UNFORTUNATE DECLINE OF DELUSION

Trust me: no one ever is really so loved –

we’re all held accountable, yes me, yes you.

All of love is hopelessness, bother, trouble…

Loving another

means the mind is trapped, unresponsive, rapt. So

love accrues like debt and then sends its bill: too

costly. Face it: vanity counts its pennies.

Restlessness follows.

About the Author
Renee Ashley is the author of three volumes of poetry -- Salt, Brittingham Prize in Poetry, (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), The Various Reasons of Light (Avocet Press, 1998), and The Revisionist's Dream (Avocet Press, 2001). She is also the author of a novel, Someplace Like This (Permanent Press, NY, 2003), and a chapbook, The Museum of Lost Wings. Ashley has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is co-poetry editor of The Literary Review, and on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University's low-residency MFA program.