Leslie A. Fiedler
PARK WITH LOVERS
If Sherman's horse can take it, why can't you?
The Heroes
cry
"stone" among the rubble;
Their horses, goosed by the jocular lubber,
Gasp "stone," too-- and through what gossip
The leaves afford, drops the dim pebble
Of dark's usual affront to the last puddle
Of light, where dust lights like a cripple.
Wits, mocking the grass or occasional cripple,
Spit, but without animus, split the rubble
With the mouth's white star, contemptuous puddle.
The lovers toward dusk wince at the lubber,
Their moist eyes troubled by his scorn's pebble,
Whose fall they fear ripples to gossip.
They are not afraid of the leaves' garbled gossip,
The short annals of twigs they made cripple
With their bodies tossed like a pebble,
Forgotten before lost or remanded to rubble.
Their business, their beauty is brief- what lubber
Plunges back from the bushes to night's other puddle?
They look for each other in that unlit puddle,
But their eyes, flinching from sweat or gossip,
Undo reflection. The tart touches the lubber;
They remember the drowned lovers. The cripple
Of their sex regrets now in the rubble
Of buttons or silk hardness of the pebble.
What star pelts them with the blue pebble
Of its light they will redeem in the puddle
Of slight remembering; or save, in the rubble
Of fumbled ecstasies before age, dull gossip,
Discovers in himself time's cripple,
Who went forth a tall, untiring lubber.
