Must business thee from hence remove?
- Donne, "Break of Day"
I muse that such love at our age
is as improbable as a flowering cactus
when my arthritic knees and leaping thoughts stir
before you wake at dawn.
Our annual physicals yield subprime mortgages,
Time's winged chariot enters the Indy 500.
But I'll attend to our sleepy smiles,
not its failing brakes at dawn.
The territory between your shoulder blades
curves to cradle and protect the chin
I'll soon need to stick out at work.
Surely it's still dark, not dawn.
The Times also crashes by our door, but let's hear it for
these instruments that link us here (though less frequently),
not those new instruments devised by young bankers
who embark for work way before dawn.
We too must leave for the "real world"? But truth awakes
in our private bedroom, not in private bankers' lairs.
Yet brokers afford pet phoenixes and feast on packaged larks:
disjunctive conjunctions born at dawn.
Heather Dubrow, John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham University, is the author of Forms and Hollows (Cherry Grove Collections) and two chapbooks. Among the journals where her work has appeared are Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review. She directs Fordham's Poets Out Loud reading series. Also a literary critic, she has published six monographs, a co-edited collection of essays, and an edition of As You Like It.
