Olives

“Dead people don’t like olives,”

I told my partners in eighth grade   

dancing class, who never listened   

as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two.   

   

The dead people I often consulted   

nodded their skulls in unison   

while I flung my black velvet cape   

over my shoulders and glowered   

from deep-set, burning eyes,   

walking the city streets, alone at fifteen,   

crazy for cheerleaders and poems.   

   

At Hamden High football games, girls   

in short pleated skirts   

pranced and kicked, and I longed   

for their memorable thighs.   

They were friendly—poets were mascots—   

but never listened when I told them   

that dead people didn’t like olives.   

   

Instead the poet, wearing his cape,   

continued to prowl in solitude   

intoning inscrutable stanzas   

as halfbacks and tackles   

made out, Friday nights after football,   

on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms   

with magnanimous cheerleaders.   

   

But, decades later, when the dead   

have stopped blathering   

about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze   

upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders   

waiting for hip replacements,   

while a lascivious, doddering poet,   

his burning eyes deep-set   

in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.