Love, for instance, is a setup.
Like in Chagall’s painting, The Birthday,
you would think every object in the room broke loose
by spontaneous combustion. But love has been planned
to happen that way for some time, although
this occasion is new. When her lover was thinking
flowers, you must know he figured hormones
and could already imagine the wings of her collar,
her breasts like wings, Mary Poppins, transported,
unmoored. And look at her eyes as she kisses him,
wide open, deliberate as his flowers. She watches him
roll out of her mouth like a ghostly language
and drift down her back, en train.
She has made him up.
You know she has made him up because he has no arms
and can’t even be a real lover, rubber-necked and armless.
He couldn’t even hold down a job.
How wonderful it is to get things into that condition,
to make even the paisley print on the wall wiggle
like tadpoles! It is especially a good idea
since outside one window, a row of guardhouses
plods whitely down the street, and outside the other,
nothing but a ladder of more windows.
With love, you can have a red floor, and rise above it.
But don’t expect to be believed, entirely:
the melon, the cake, and the stool are round-eyed,
but it is feigned innocence, not surprise.
The blunt knife is aimed at the hole in the cake,
a little joke. The bulging purse lies on the edge
of the table where it might fall to somebody’s ruin.
The clincher is the stool, absolutely round
and black, bouncing off its legs, a hole
you fall into just under the flowers.