The Double Ds of Desire and Despair
are in the long, slow torso of a woman bent back, seeing
and not being seen. It’s a cache problem: a steady line
of two-faced two-fers on a Saturday night, the Double Divas
porn site he logged off of when she walked in the room.
No honesty counter, no single-breasted action figure
to save this boy who meets world
then checks his e-mail before he shuts down.
He spins around in his chair with the kind of satisfaction
that comes from the gotten-over-on, the something-well-transacted,
the just-got-greased. This is the old fish story that legends are
made of,
not the come-heres and fisticuffs of what actually happened,
what made her go to the living room, let him finger her
while watching the movie, the way he’ll be distracted later,
during sex, by Rodin’s Nude hanging over the bed
like a broad-band vision of all that looks good but doesn’t
speak. When he starts the NC-17 talk in her ear,
she listens carefully, arches her back,
murderous and sentimental, like a staircase.
From chapbook Obscene Rhetoric (Philadelphia, Pa.: Archangel Press, 2002)