AMBIVALENT LOVE STORY

He was hooked

with wanting a living primrose,

who was shapely and unblemished,

with the creative urgency

of a colossal swell of the sea.

His happiness of the moment

was tarnished by a door locked

with a dead bolt.

Stuck in a morass of sadness,

she glowed like a weeping

cherry tree,

almost drowning in the turning tides.

She couldn’t say yes,

she couldn’t say no,

she couldn’t say stay,

and she couldn’t say go.

II

He was sprung from the Tombs

with affidavits and depositions

and judges banging on gavels.

She arranged for an Alabama divorce

and left the ICU at French Hospital

with a cadre of weeping Nuns.

On the way to Levantine shores,

gossiping tongues in a garden’s gazebo

didn’t know what they knew.

Two bodies roamed skin to skin

as they discovered a meditation present,

with the castanets and tambourines

of the here and now taming the wild beast.

When he found the key

in a bronze Buddha,

she unwrapped her towel,

unfurled like a lotus,

and slid into bed.