Learned Hands Send Us Away Poem by Bernard Henrie

Makeshift rain dampens the clapboard city.
Self-absorbed buses elbow through traffic
like police at a murder scene.

The bank locks tight. Workers with umbrellas
shift across streets while looters drift down alleys,
listening as telephones ring for someone else.

We walk to our favorite motel, an aging professor
and a co-ed in fashionable shoes, clean short legs
smooth to the touch.

Lamps illuminate a plastic bloom in an azure vase,
the chintz bedspread and lightly scented sheets.
When you bathe, I smoke sitting by the tub
sullen as an Arapaho on a prairie reservation.

Underwear later pulled back up. Windup watch
and ten o'clock curfew. I am expected back home
with a baguette for my daughter. Bon voyage,
Riviera. Goodbye to Utica and half-devoured studies,
the succumbed kiss in errless dark, roaring breath
dormant like a blister in a wound.

The rain turns to snow, road graders idle at the end
of avenues and soon no one will go out.

Downstairs, the cashier's yellow cat snores
into eternity,