08-07-2020, 03:24 AM
The Donkey's Lament For Months Without Matilda
I hear him in the distance;
he knows what I'm thinking,
wretched,
like D. H. Lawrence said,
. . . more feeling than thought.
At least for him.
As for me, I think a good
deal more about this girl,
this dark, pale lovely in glasses;
the wine is always better when she bags it,
the music, as I eat my cheese and sardines
dinner.
How easy a gentle love
when all your lust is deeply, deeply
hidden
in the conversation of the moment.
Or far fields and forests,
between,
an erotic mourning rising
only a moronic animal clamor,
concentrated as the rooster at night
that cocked in dusk and darkness
as I awaited that one who would never come.
My girls keep getting thinner,
but
there's weight in all the places
to pound against my heart like the braying of a donkey.
Matilda, you will never be old enough to understand
how a young girl makes an old man
stubbornly, alive again, as a donkey.
Foolish as a donkey. And like a donkey,
I protect my cows
from wolves and coyotes.
As foul and silly to you,
as another species.