Serengeti Sunshine

Baby, we sat around that supper
our oak table heaped with ruddy meats
your prescriptions split and ground,
powders and pieces on lace and paper
buzzing, smoking in the wind, in the streets
and roasted fruits, grinning in the sun

Pulling from the sidewalk beggars and boys
with the crackle and the smoke of
such excess, the dancers and the grieving,
the amnesiacs, the confused and other people in love

To stumble between its Scylla
and your Charybdis
To be chased (as we are) through the night rain
to retreat through looted streets,
kicked-in doors, this:
our door; hush; from here we can see them all --

Hear the streets pound
with the jackboots of Zion
the rain threading their masks,
their night sticks, torches, Olympic

And our television plays a dirty film:
some man with a mustache in the summer
in the silt of some vein of the Oranjerivier
and a woman cooling the arc of her
ribs, the water blows through her fingers like a breeze
-- you wonder if there might be a hyena in the grass --

Turn it off, that laugh, and sit up, now:
leave every candystriped letter
every fat bundle of lace and California denim
that would hold your body dear; we have to go!

Running eyes closed through the sopping streets
sprinting, our hands held like children
spinning, spinning through the park as the sun goes out,

gotta get to the party, love,
gotta get to the center --
slip through the door
menagerie, corset, net and feather:
we have come to it at last!
atop every washer (there are hundreds)
a lady, playing at burlesque, legs crossed

atop every dryer, a lad, here sloshing his sidecar,
there waiting on that blue-bottled gin, the bite of pine,
the laundromat walls yellow over our speakeasy
singing fat Serengeti sunshine

and that hot red wine,
it bleeds into me,
mandelbrot curls through my clothes
you're sorry, you're sorry

And I stand in my whites
washing out the stain
in that lethe spiral
watch you sigh as your glass sweats
and in my ears - the bump,
bump bump of two shoes in the cycle