[Turner Cassity]

Café Noir


He turned her bedroom into a garage,
just ripped a hole in the wall and gutted it.
He never could hold on to a parking space,
you said. That month we suffered a barrage
of demolition noise; Annette had split.
Then one day he pulled up in a beat-up Lexus
with inanition chiseled on his face.
He said Annette was somewhere in West Texas.

I dreamt I wrote this living in a canyon
outside Malibu. Pacific waves
sent salt in through the trees; a massive banyan
stood near a fresh-dug grave.
At breakfast we were drinking café noir.
You said we wouldn’t always need a car.



Comments:

The octave and the sestet seem to belong to different poems. “Inanition” is too scholarly a word for the context. Even in West Texas Annette may be having more fun.