Luisa's Afternoon
I.
In the morning she descends the steps, azure bowtie in her hair
Swinging wildly in the early summer’s wind, a collection of curled chestnut locks,
Lashes batting as she spots my figure lean across the platform, waiting there
To greet her in my arms, and there she runs, my heart stops fast,
Oxfords blue and suede pattering past the pavement, to hold her in my arms,
And then we walk, my anxious tremors curbed by her quirky smiles
That she has always hence reserved for me — but why are they for me?
II.
She topples down upon my bed, a mattress sprightly like her gait, her naked breasts
Now rubbing quick against my hairless chest, a giggle precious like a pierced balloon,
Her fingers scraggly, I ask her now to place her mouth — and how well she submits!
I bounce up now entirely amused, her watch-face beaming out toward my socks
That lay splayed atop the carpet, upon which my gaze lands as her hand moves
And to experience such euphoria, in wake, it wanes, my previous enjoyment now it stands
Undaunted, yet, but clear; she envisions a whip of sorts over which no longer I have claim
Her tinny laughter reigning o’er the room, the house, Oh Heinrich!
III.
She stands denuded, in her hands she holds a glass of wine which I have carefully selected
From the stash of noirs and grigios and gigolos, the piano near the kitchen table echoing
My lust — pine-trees in the garden, an ascent to heaven’s servitude, for now morality must I
Entertain, and show her all my books, photo albums filled with sunshine days of that word
I dare not now pronounce, back in my youth, before the sullen tumour — but do not despair!
It is an illness of the mind about which I cannot speak, distractions with her poesy, my prosody
As a young child doodles in a binder black a world of fantasia which she never will access
For it is the world of the mind to which I alone lay claim!
IV.
Scattered on my bedroom’s carpet she dumps a box that’s filled with puzzle pieces,
One hundred and two hundred more, the edges sliding in meticulous in stable places
Where they all belong, the negroes on the record-player crooning songs my ears have never
Deigned to hear, but she is all enjoyment, hazel eyes parading down the room they land upon
My Kandinsky — she asks now why it is I’ve gotten such a piece of art, and I can only shrug
For what is it to her what art we bring into the household when I create my art alone superior
To the pieces put together so pernicious perfect how unchanging this portrait it must be!
V.
Luisa asks me when I’d like to visit her, over a bowl of Minestrone soup;
I pale, my countenance deceiving, but I have drunken a chalice and a glass or two or three
Drunken myself into a stupor on top of all the pills and her request it pains me not to hear
I tell her, “Saturday,” and nod off into a dream, rejecting from my ears her words that tell me
It must come soon to a close, this world of ours that we’ve constructed prematurely
Her breasts still naked now repulsive as my fingers brush against her cheek —-
Once was my Luisa now another girl I’d like soon to forget, and she does not yet know —
How soon I feel her wrath!
VI.
Upon an early summer’s afternoon, the verdurous garden ferns brush against my legs
As I stand in wait, Luisa’s tread already seven minutes late, arriving now,
Her smile unsuspect: “Sorry, my dear, I got caught up in the wonders of the spring.”
When we have all devolved into the summertime, to call it yet the spring!
She lags behind, I sit her down upon the newly watered lawns, she sipping water that is mine,
Places it down, begins to hear my words to her, but just a sentence of ressentiment,
Her smile fading, that ever present grin I have at last erased!