Couplings (a poem)

Dublin is married to the word. Theirs is a committed and unflinching union
a pair of ornithologists, field glasses dangling from their necks certainty
in their step. Where to go now. Here.  Put. It. Down. She does not always lead.
Nor does she question, for theirs is an intuitive love, born of trust, having
known hunger and blood, death, exhaustion. Dublin does not falter when Word leans
against a tree to catch its breath. There are no questions. There is nothing held between them -
no interlopers, no lovers past to haunt or hamper or matter. There is Dublin and Word together.

New Orleans is a seductress. He got it wrong, but he wooed
her anyway and they made a baby and they lived by the sea 
like ancient nesting turtles, nurturing
all that is sultry beneath coarse decks.
Norleans is a seductress, whose words, like nimble, efficient
lovers, remain within the confines of her shell, simmering
cleaving, erotic, tempting us - all
to enter the sultry space, to know
Norleans is a seductress, a mistress of words made soft
and urgent and pressing. pressing here. and here. and.
here.


Manhattan turns tricks, sometimes for money. 
Part slave, part junkie, she returns, never
to the well made bed but always to the brothel -
giving lip service to the workaday prince and
cleaner sheets and picket fence but wandering endlessly away,
like a child neither eager to get to school nor to get home,
dragging a toe along the sidewalk. She is child and whore.
Writer but not. Ready -  always, always, almost.