POEMS
THE DRINKER
The man is killing time-there's nothing else.
No help now from the fifth of Bourbon chucked
helter-skelter into the river, even its cork sucked
under and smashed on the cement embankment.
Stubbed before-breakfast cigarettes
burn bull's-eyes on the bedside table;
a plastic tumbler of alka seltzer
champagnes in the bathroom.
No help from his body, the whale's
warm-hearted blubber, foundering down
leagues of ocean, gasping whiteness.
The barbed hooks fester, the lines snap tight.
When he looks for neighbors, their names blur in the window,
his distracted eye sees only glass sky.
His despair has the galvanized color
of the mop and water in the galvanized bucket.
Once she was close to him
as water to the dead metal.
He looks at her engagements inked on the calendar.
A list of indictments.
At the numbers in her thumbed black telephone book.
A quiver full of arrows.
