for L.S.

Author's Reading (requires RealPlayer)

Summer in Aspen: the namesaked trees
investing pale fluff in any opening--
stairwell, window, unguarded yawn,
hired hands hauling it away in black bags.
James Dickey, telling you and me to read
Dryden and Pope and to empty our heads
of metaphor. Slipping into elegant French
rolling down from his heights as easy
as aspen fuzz, easy on his tongue
as old Southern whiskey, he presided
over our premises, our poetic promises.
He didn't believe in beautiful.

Evenings the local jazz was good,
and our Jewish roommate's cheeseless lasagna
at midnight. Afterward, at the dark
bedroom window, the mountain pressed closer,
pleading for lyrics we shunned.

That last angry session you said our poems
had been aborted, dissected to death.
Dickey said they were never conceived,
called them false pregnancies.
I said they'd been artificially inseminated
in glass outside the warm womb--
laboratory entities. What did anyone expect
from altitude so dry and dreamless, swirling
with the white invective of seeds denied?

After all these years on level safe terrain,
each night beneath my lids
the mountain waits.