stealing a march

her mother calls me
into question; suzi gets married
there are many pieces of my anger
all part of this cloth
and Kathleen's pure passion
laid on an oriental carpet
her nipples stiff in a philosophic heat
o baby I am watching your hands fly
in patterns white & pure
as if you had sparklers to write it
out so we could finally see
I think I believe you anyway
it makes you holy Lane
your hands your words woven
in a cloak of many colours
none of it making sense
except that if it's you wearing it
whirling your changing features in
an amorous explanation it is all
true

and these vestiges of perception:
they've changed
you took me in a dark night
at 4 a.m. with the remains
of a bond burned by our ambition
I left you and on the way home
wrote this piece
you could say, I stole a march

This poem is one of those from the notebooks. I never showed it to Kathy Lane, the girl in Davenport I had a distinct yen for. She was friends with Suzi Olds, who was Pat's major friend and who dated Michael Zoeller, my Louisville friend, for awhile. Michael somehow irritated Suzi and she ended up marrying this guy named Robert, who was a handsome Omar Sharif looking kind of guy but who wasn't too bright, but very macho. Suzi was a take no prisoners type. Lane was a small intense girl, one of the few non-blondes in my romantic history. Suzi did get married and I went to Davenport for the wedding. I got drunk with Kathy Hogan, who I had known at St. Louis U. Hogan was buds with Nora Jones and at Suzi's wedding party we got drunk together and she strongly advised me to have sex with Nora and "get it over with." Because she felt it was something we both needed to do. Well, it was the seventies and I did a lot of weird things for dumb reasons. I slept with Nora, though I was afrad to because she was an ace feminist and frankly I am not the submissive type in the bedroom. Of course it turned out poorly.

This poem is about Lane and myself both talking about changing the world in some intrinsic fashion and being, of course, known for that. She was a beautiful crazy girl. I always did like that.