Three poems by Robert Estep

Why Did You Return, Sir?

Was it the expat jazz club, Celtic pizzeria, Symbionese

tea-room with bongos, Bambis, and bingo?

The color of a dream in which verbs took aim,

fresh out of artificial control?

The pedantic grip of a woman's tax-

free thighs, perfumed 'intense indigo'?

Stars painted on curtains and wall, meek

attendants christened 'Always' and 'Constance'?

This place, this ethos, this attempt to flag

and label the triumphant pushpin is causing

a noticeable tremor in your lover's kleptic fingers.

Sir.

Was it the curvy husk of a palm spanking velvet?

Was it the failure of the minor key bridge,

midway Madam's wicked song?

You paid for exactly what you were given.

Will it be the usual table this evening?

And morning as well, perhaps?

Please follow me, Sir.

There's someone who needs a word with you.

Runaway

Anguila rides Castoria, venetian

blinds shiver on the 3rd floor

of the Honeymoon Hospice.

Thirty-seven hours without a nod.

Her vocabulary drained away, the place

she might have been at when she first

formed an impression of love as luck,

and dumb luck at that, was enough

like the place she'd imagined when he reached

behind the screen to caress the humid air

between her knees.

Not completely, but close enough.

No room service, no maid service, no wake-up call.

One settled where one slept.

She incorporates the hotel's noisy restaurant

into her bone-weary dream.

A meandering song, framed in black shellac,

its drifting melody never quite resolving

but circling, paralleled in a peculiarly liquid guitar line

that repeats and falls off and repeats again

till the stutter of the drop-away

becomes the pattern's anticipated moment.

A plate of figs, a wide spatula of sizzling beef,

a small glass of some autumnal cloudy juice,

she hears them being offered, turns her head

to sink deeper to the pillow,

the linen under her cheek cool as a low-tide dune,

emerging moonsoaked from the sea.

from 'Render Unto Caesar'

xi

How a ship steamed out of Danzig

with a manifest of unpronounceable sorrow,

passed with a ghostly lightness near Dakar,

in hailing distance of a colonial bathing party,

and spent the next decade as a disassembled set design

behind an opera house deep in the heart of the Amazon.

How a German redhead learned to flirt in Spanish,

milking from an evening's worth of black moustachios

the martial best and marital worst of propositions,

compliments, and proposals, the bewilderment

of a stranger's tongue easing and insistent beneath her,

the tease of her glide across a dance floor wobbly with swastikas.

How the whitesuited Bolivians gained upon the fleeing doe

of music, violins scratching and pitching at the eggwhite underbelly

in hopes of drawing blood, the brass of trumpet,

tuba, and trombone weaving in and out of key

with the seasick warp of an ancient LP,

the crippling honk of a giant blind beetle,

looking not to kill but to be killed,

dragging its misery behind it

like a tin can on a newlywed's fender.