Bicycle Built for Two

On the real azalea path we rode.

I can tell you what it was like, I was a celebrity:

Babies waved and dachshunds barked,

I had nothing to do but be carried along;

The colors were peaking, peaking.

Foaming over their own heads like seltzer.

I knew in which order they bloomed, even:

The dark welling wine ones were last.

It was Ash Wednesday and no one was dirty.

It was Holy Thursday and no one had halos.

My niece was in town with her boyfriend.

She was wearing a T-shirt that said Blessed

By God, Spoiled by My Electrician, Protected

By Both. The Triple Goddess had been 

Surpassed, he was wearing a T-shirt 

Printed with six of her faces 

And over it her name in huge flaming 

Hip-hop font. They were riding, 

Ding, through fields of flowers, past 

Parliaments of black-lacquered

Turtles, Easter lilies

And pale air-sipping buttercups. 

Romeo + Juliet on Hilton Head Island.

I think, as we were leaving, 

He said thank you for this day.

You build a world. You put animals in it:

Alligators and axolotls. You invent green

Grass, wire up the stars, you are 

The first people it ever happened to.

Spoiled by your electrician and protected

By God. Can you imagine the T-shirts

They would have had printed:

We had built something like that.

It was like the time I found sentences

He had highlighted in Codependent No More

And then afterward he wouldn’t go with me

Into Walgreens for my flu shot anymore.

I think he was having an affair. I think I 

Was having an affair. Anyway nothing

Like that matters anymore. I am telling you

From the other side of death, it really doesn’t. 

Someone in the hospital held his hand.

Like surf the wind rinses the mind.

I heard six lines as we rode. I chanted

For ten miles so I wouldn’t lose them,

I thought certainly he would hear me,

Repeating to his warm rib cage: