| TONIGHT by John Horvath TONIGHT I am yours ‘til earth crumbles too soon, too soon it crumbles dogs howling along the streets bitches marking their discontent too soon it crumbles, too soon be mine ‘til moonfall and daybreak WORRY ABOUT A LOVER WHO EAGERLY RUSHES TO WORK EACH MORNING I feel she does not love me as she had so long ago; It’s not some thing she’s said or done, but something that I know Deep in my heart and soul. I feel she doesn’t love me so Delay to ask the question whose answer will make me go.Every morning when I awake she is already gone Greedily to work: it’s not the pay nor respect she’s won: One lover is not enough for a woman who is blonde. She does not love me; I will go. I shall go soon, be gone.Love is a frightful thing to own; it mingles jealousy Inside itself with unsaid thoughts to make false memory. Before the sun is down at end of day, there is no WE “In love”; for, love has turned to lust and sex revengefully. “Damned Bear” she calls me when back home: so eagerly – Oh, how she craves – my tearing off her clothes for sex, you see.She makes me worry just to have me at the end of day. What’s left is right when we set right imagined wrongs. As age enfolds, it is the only game we still will play. REVE doctoring smallish parts, color of tablecloth whose frayed edges flag in mid- day summer breeze when we met alongside creek built dams under trees despite humming insects, ignoring water giggling over slate and bedrock, into evening insect infested when we hurried to your apartment to disrobe to examine what new marks might lay claim to our having been together that summer day at creek- side by tables covered in green clothe whose frayed threads waved to us good- bye because love doctors memory so happily ever… TOO YOUNG, TOO SHORT FOR LOVE at night alone, though proud of his accomplishment, he lay in bed and wondered whether he’d been her first, a face and name, a man forever set apart from other men or had there been a someone else for whom she moaned, for whom her arms were meant? He’d never know, like other men before him never knew as would those coming after know where he had been among her list of long forgotten names. I’d very like to know, he said almost aloud (the faintest echo upon his bedroom ceiling broke and all its fragments were absorbed by this or that apparel he had too often promised he would clean and straighten up). Weren’t there more important things that he should be about? And, what about those thoughts that needed close attention in his unmade bed at night? He rose from failed sleep in the middle of the night to phone. It rang and rang and rang quite much; he figured that she wasn’t home.Where had she gone? To someone else’s house? No, he’d left her dead, there was nothing He should fret about. She couldn’t move. A petit death, the angels must have lifted her to heaven when he fell asleep upon her naked flesh dark as almonds, sweet as cane, roiling like a rapid river during flood.And yet… There was no blood. Was that a sign? He’d heard it was the mark of first fling or something near to that. My god, sixteen’s a bitch of time for having sex! No. Hard as he thought, there was no blood, nor even a small sign of it. He called her once again.The phone rang once. Her muffled voice as if from deepest sleep was there. And, when he told her his thoughts then asked whether he’d been first, she’d said, “Don’t trouble your sad self all night with that; you were the first and probably the last; now don’t call back.” So there he sat. Where he had thought. Alone at night.What was the name she gave him amid the rampage of his love and lust: did she call out “Swarthy” or “Shorty” (he didn’t know; he likely never would). He stayed awake all starry night. ORIOS WITHOUT HIS CHOSEN LADY Orios on the morning of the twelfth pretends he is not alone in bed, has never been; his large hands reach across linen to a stuffed pillow soft and round, encased in the scent of secret perfume, the kind she wore when they had met then been together (lovers unexpectedly she’d thought, although he knows the shape and bulk and use of words, how one might lead if wed correctly to the next to this so soft block, his roomy bed of soundless delights). He swore at emptiness then closed his eyes against the fact that she had left long before dawn on cattish toes, without a whisper of goodbye, no kiss (Orios had pretended sleep; he knew she’d rise and walk against growing old with him, perhaps together until death).She had moved nimble without a sound. He’d heard her breath, as if she feared that he might wake and strike her down (oh, yes, he wished he had) or bar her exit (that too he wished) to hold her always at his side. Orios alone again at morning shaves his crooked jaw and looks upon an ugly face. Its nose half flat against his cheeks, ears too grand and pendular.Squinty eyes too narrow and too dark, like blackened peas; his hair unkempt. But he was large and muscular so that in dimlit places late at night he might be taken for quite a catch. Soft-spoken too. He knew words’ shape and bulk and use so used them well in order to entice his chosen lady to his lair. But once– just this once– he wished the woman he had chosen would remain despite the truth of ugliness that had appeared near dawn. Why get out and go about a normal day as if he were a man and not a beast? Or, perhaps, it is the beast in each of us, Orios thought, that makes us act instinctively toward work and lust. She would be back. Or, another would soon take her place. Each morning he would make that bet. About the Author: Mississippian John Horváth Jr publishes internationally since the 1960s (recently in Munyori Review (Zimbabwe); Broad River Review (print). Pyrokinection, Pink Litter, and Olentangy Review). After Vanderbilt and Florida State universities, “Doc” Horváth taught at historically Black colleges. Since 1997, to promote contemporary international poetry, Horváth edits www.poetryrepairs.com. . | |