Poems copyright 2007 by Simone Beaubien. Poets in Love They meet in a bookstore. She drops Sappho on his foot. He feels obliged to purchase it and so they pass stanzas back and forth over coffee for the rest of the afternoon. They don’t quite have the hang of talking and so they send letters. In his first he encloses something from e.e. cummings. She retorts with Amy Lowell and so they court: each appropriation more meaningful than the last. Finally, he sends her Shakespeare and she doesn't respond. Fearful that he’s moved too fast, he retreats to the safety of Basho but when she replies flirtatiously with Ono No Komanchi he understands her needs, encloses Issa in his next reply. He uses William Carlos Williams to ask her to move in. They have a lot of bookshelves. They have breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins every day. The grocery list is in Bukowski's handwriting and life falls open to a comfortable page each morning, closes into soft, dog-eared security when night falls. One day at work the man has a meeting and is going to be late for dinner. He gleans anthologies for an excuse but poets only seem to have affairs or funerals. In a pinch he settles for John Donne and when he opens the door hours after dinnertime, she looks up from the kitchen table, eyes wet, and hurls Erica Jong at him, pages flapping. He ducks, runs to the study in search of something to put the situation right; desperate for a writer who's done something wrong and is sorry for it, a hit poet guilty of incidental miscommunication and she stands in the doorway infuriated, confused, betrayed a doused muse, fists full of Plath-- and that's when the wind comes up and knocks the power out. O, lucky lovers. The only book he can identify by touch is the dictionary. but he doesn’t know the page number for “sorry,” hasn't memorized the definition of his love and in the lightless room he has no choice but to take her in his arms, fold her under his elbows into creases the two of them never knew they had, the Braille of two readers who never before had to run their fingers across the lines of a page, never let their mouths move around the printed word for fear of their own sound. Finally, they realize it's too dark to read, and so they just hold each other, empty lips pressing kisses to the night as the white moon rises in a black sky. Mercury Moon The full moon sinks into the sky like a heelprint in the desert sand and I’m on the beach counting how many miles away she is. If we each knew our own distance to the moon she could triangulate the number of steps between us. I could sink each foot in sand until I could press my hands to the locked doors around her. I watch the waves roll in. The stars shudder behind ocean mist. Red Mars winks at me from the horizon. Later, she will tell me her planet is Mercury. Her mother’s womb awash in metal the hard silver settled into her brain. Now the doctors tell us it’s what’s made her weak: hypoglycemic, bipolar, anorexic. There’s hope in her voice when she talks about detox three hundred sixty-five days and she’ll be good as new. The doctors do not forget to tell us that this is not a cure. After a lifetime of being chained down by heavy metal it’s hard to walk like you’re free. She’s reminded to be careful what she ingests warned of high mercury content in fish. Add that to the list of things she already won’t eat: chicken, beef, pork lactose, gluten, fat chocolate, candy, caffeine. Her belly, swollen from malnutrition wanes to one thin rib. Oh, moon: Diana, virgin huntress running with the dogs tell me how you let my friend become a skeleton eroded her flesh with your tides five, ten, fifteen glasses of water a day twenty-nine and a half calories in every serving of cottage cheese: I’ve got news for you, moon, no one’s given birth from bones for a long time and Miss America contestants have their lowest ribs removed by surgeons since Venus did not see fit to bless them with a more defined waist. And the moon wants to know What kind of a woman am I to eat what I want and want what I eat not to swell or shrink with the consequences of everything I taste. She turns her nose up at sweets. Turns her back on flesh of any kind. Chews metal at mealtimes: zinc for breakfast lithium for lunch her eyes glint steel blue. She comes home from the desert in winter just in time to watch the mercury dropping in the thermometer as though our common cold were a cure. And I’m on the beach. Counting the days until she circles back into our lives floods into our hearts quick and cold I’m on the beach with my back to the moon and my hands in the tide my face upturned towards the planets but Mercury is invisible to me. When I get home, she’ll be sitting at the kitchen table collarbones sinking back underneath her pale skin watching us eat while she swallows her pills: the ones to chase the gravity out of her body the ones that make her sleep at night so she can’t see the moon. The Last Man on Earth "Seeing as the world is coming to an end," he asks, "I was wondering if you’d be willing to go to dinner with me." This close to the Apocalypse, cell phone reception is terrible and I have to ask him to repeat himself twice. I tell him yes, but, so as not to appear too eager, we schedule for two weeks ahead, on a Tuesday. By the time the date rolls around, the Four Horsemen have already ridden and the tapas bar is a cantilevered pile of rubble. We squat over the steaming bricks and talk about Barcelona: how the tiny, pale tentacles of the squid curl in their exquisite vermillion oils; the sweet, smoky egg of the crème Catalan; and the Parc Guell, its lovely curves made of delicate, shattered things. Probably no one has a key to it anymore. We decide to go out again, this time on a Friday. It’s hard to tell when Friday is, so we agree it will be the next time the widower Murphy serves fish at the new common kitchen. The widower Murphy dies of the shaking fever two days later, but we go out anyway. I didn’t intend to dress up, but I’m pretty sure I’m wearing the last blue jeans in the world. At the end of the night, he says "Seeing as all the condoms in the world will expire in two to four years, I was wondering if you’d go to bed with me tonight." There isn’t a bed. I make him lie down first on the burning sands and, afterwards, I pick the white, bubbled crust from his buttocks and shoulder blades. We can’t make up our minds to go out again, so he just never leaves. It’s okay. There’s no place left to go. Poems copyright 2007 by Simone Beaubien.