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The Poetry Of.
Bernard Bucholis



The Summer House

I don't know where
the money goes, she said
with worry; gave a little laugh.
Shook dull blonde curls
she didn't know were showing
black
at the roots. She couldn't smell
the twenty
year old scotch
or tell-tale mixture of French perfume
fixed with a fishy trace of sand dune
from Cape Hatteras; wouldn't
get close
enough. That was left
to the children, patted and kissed at
light's out, after obligatory
Angel of God My Guardian Dear by a father whose mind
was still out there, groping a shopgirl
he'd earlier slid across our Studebaker seats
betraying all of us,
but we didn't have a Miltown to keep
it fuzzy, or want to do anything
but shuffle into the gameroom
to watch another evening episode
of Studio One,
but there was the sun.
The merciless,
summer sun
that sees everything,
sun for growing tall
in a home
away from home that never was but a place
to send those pretty lighthouse
picture postcards from.





Sometimes, There Are Lights

behind the eyes, deep in
the sockets, wrapped
around the
retinal nerve, small specks
of light
I used to imagine at the bottom
of the door in the space where shoes
appeared. Stopped, but never came in; four
and terrified
that I was the only one left
of all the bleeding, howling house,
but sometimes
even now, I see
such
similar lights.





If You Were With Me

If you were with me, I think
there'd be a reason
to put the kettle on, make
the bed, stir
the soap to foam
and shave a face so tired of looking
in the same, old mirror; whose thoughts of razors
do not first
go on
to splitting life
from vein, or memory from days when you were close
enough, I felt the heat and held one solid piece, and all
of it brave.





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