Thigh-high Leather Boots
The color red--candied, glossy--
uniform lipstick cylinders nude
outside their metal sheathes:
under indoor artificial arc lamps
stretching above the bar, they shine
like a lawyer's polished shoes,
although to say they shine is like
saying the tongue of spending fuel
on an orbiter merely burns.
Instead it seems as though someone
has frozen the flicker of a diamond's
rainbowed spark. Their luster
shapes the legs that wield them,
the waist they hold like a neck
on eye-like curving shoulders.
They are the two knife-point ends
on a flying-V guitar: decorations
wresting from the place where
melodies begin, songs of love &
lust pick up momentum past their
timid origins. Or else they are
parallel lines that merge, a trick
of the horizon--going further,
one might follow to infinity.
Enjoy This Sensation of Being Lost
Do seagulls know they've flown too far inland?
When their blue oasis becomes the mud-thick shore
of a landlocked state? The bloated Ohio spills onto
a boat ramp at Harris Riverfront Park, & gulls
wait there as if lovers whose soul mates arrive
by the next barge. One flies along the bank,
its body straight, cylindrical & precise like a giant
hummingbird. Another stands, poses, head raised
like an eagle. We walk along the pathway,
search for buns, seeds, stale popcorn, any meal
to serve the guests. Three mallards follow.
The two males have hoods green as the sea
up close, though bluer as well from a distance.
They belong like squirrels on campus grounds,
carp that gather en masse at lakeside docks
to be fed by restless campers. The gulls flow
to a different stream, not children of Oceanus,
but the ocean itself, & islands where they know
the word paradise. Here, they are like tourists,
cameras for eyes, bodies jet-lagged from flight
yet so alive, so unable to rest their hollow bones.
--Ace Boggess