At LAX, wandering among lost luggage and children in sunglasses like flocks of dwarf directors, I should have known him under the disguise of an old friend. Despite the corduroy jacket and prep-school tie, when I kissed that mouth, clasped in its parenthetical expression of temper by the lines from nose to mouth, as an old Catholic girl, I should have recognized the aftertaste of a god. He stayed three days and watched the Marineland killer whale snatch mackerel from a woman's mouth, an old man vacuum castle stairs in a miniature golf course at midnight. My days were cluttered with half similes - always the caboose and nothing @3like@1 to hitch it to. Until he checked in for smoking and the window seat, I didn't recognize him wearing my friend like a glove. But it seemed appropriate, after his other human loves - the unfaithful lion wrestler and frigid Cassandra - that it was us, the Sapphos, blue-stockinged office temporaries wearing our ink like eyeshadow, who were faithful to the last stanza, where I left him in LAX waiting for a flight to some other woman poet among palm trees decked out in wreaths of another god. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THIRD BOOK OF AIRS: SONG 23 by THOMAS CAMPION CORIDON'S SONG (IN ISAAK WALTON'S 'COMPLEAT ANGLER') by JOHN CHALKHILL WHAT MY LOVER SAID by HOMER GREENE THE SLAVE'S DREAM by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW MARSYAS by CHARLES GEORGE DOUGLAS ROBERTS THE SPINNER by CLARA DOTY BATES WHITE MOMENTS by KATHARINE LEE BATES |