Tulips

I am in costume, gamine in my jaunty

blue cap as I loiter outside the saloon.

I crush my cigarette on the sidewalk,

smile with my chipped

but somehow charming teeth.

I am in this movie because I have taken

wig number one to be washed.

Because I am sitting

in my garden, actually, wearing my other

that’s nothing but a fringe of hair,

made to seem like hair

under the blue cap. Under the jauntiness

is my secret. I am a tonsured monk,

all day nothing but prayers. It’s May.

The street department is filling the awful

deep potholes with black patches,

overlapping the old gray ones. But here

are my tulips, spotlights

on the situation.

Gamin, gamine, I like the feminine,

its bemused curl at the end. I like this cap.

I like my movie, as movie,

in toto, but it seems to have come from

behind, somewhere, and I only have

these two small eyeholes

in the front of my head. I also don’t

know how it will end, with its trucks

and patches and the title of the whole

thing I call tulips, even though

they only turn on their red silk

with the sun.