Poem for the Day: In Love with his Words

In Love with his Words

                           after Kenneth Koch’s ‘In Love with You’

Every woman loves the poet who rises
on a sunny morning, claiming his love.
So it’s a pleasure reading his words when he’s
in love with love, shouting O midnight! O midnight!

Seeing him pacing the carpet, the sun raining through
the window, you can’t help repeating phrases like
“love is a taxi” a world you enter into. He’s dressed in
a stiff white shirt. She is as beautiful as October.

Their heads are together, translating Russian. Their
eyes are bigger than love discussing the previous
night, glued to a pillow on the bed, their bodies
“a couple of ruins” like Carthage and Pompeii.

When you read stanza two, you want to walk into the
park with them, swinging arm over arm, stopping like
he does with her, feeling the penetration of eyes like
daggers, hot as the ball of sun, light as the spidery

shadows that creep across the bench. You think
of the red-tipped flame of their shared cigarette.
By the time you reach the third, the second stanza
folds into the morning like Corellas into their wings.

So it is better to leave the house, thinking of love's
dominion over her, over him, it’s physical effect.
The clouds must have been massive on that day,
love as calm as pigeons, words moving towards

the famous, the ungracious King Edward, and his
abdication. You could have cured his headache with
the power of words. The world was new, mutated,
you said. You could have given him the pill, the grey

hooded light of dawn, the electricity that night puts on
into its bright self, baskets of sweet scents, soft towels
gently lowered on the bathroom floor. Oh, and how you
were revivified, breezed with kisses, so unabdicated—.