Absentee Indians and Other Poems

lament

lament for all the wild young girls spitfires branded ridden like rodeo broncos through Mainstreet for spectacle. spurred out of the chute as lana asyou live in my house younalady whipped passionate by forbidden young men in ponytails. bucking curfews homework high school dress codes. spray painting class ifnevermind coloring sarcasm in Avon sweet cherry lipstick Cover Girl blue danube eye shadow and Max Factor apple candy blush. tossing manes like Rapunzel 101 102 out every window. the ladder up streaked by sun and lemon. tossing back and back Blatz strawberry Boones Farm and peppermint schnapps. for all the giddyup girls standing in midnight dew at country kegs and blowing their youth out their nostrils: smoke signals few would understand or return. Saturday hickies hidden beneath Sunday turtlenecks worn like bridles tamed, hunched guilty, waiting, to make another breakJor it. days passed in slow recitations writing I will not a hundred times reading home-ec recipes Jor a happy marriage slip covering layer upon layer over the stains of lust like blinders blocking daylight smothering memory and longing. for all the prancing youthfullness iftime has come undone and women harnessed forget their firebrand madness. and dance, now finely choreographed like Lipizzans of haute ecole, a waltz of age. is this how? wild girls become their mother's clone. for all the vanished rebels spending quiet guilt forgetting small infractions of youth, the smell of musk, and joy. for all the tired women 103 104 wearing life like some virus they caught whose incubation was twenty years. ...