The Poet Holds a Gun
- The bullet is a simple, adolescent heartache.
- When guns go off around you, you wince like a single sheet
- and nothing in your body has ever been so simultaneous
- not even orgasm which is more like the hungry sea
- meeting an Aeolian beach with their sweet
- caper storms and lemon trees. An orgasm
- has more surface area and salt than a gun.
- On the ride home from the range, from the first lesson,
- I ask Alex if he wants to have a baby
- and he explains the mathematical formula
- for a circle tattooed across his wrist. He doesn't
- mention that I am bad at holding a gun
- or that I gasp every time I press
- the trigger while my wrist flaps back like a muscle
- from another life, or that I look like a meek captive,
- or that he could tell, without saying
- a word, that I was begging for him to take it
- out of my hands. He doesn't mention the baby and it feels
- like the small relief of passover when he gently
- takes the gun and hits the target seven times
- in a row, perfectly. We don't talk about
- how we are both from the sterile MainLine
- of Philly where the only big bookstore shut down across
- from a milkshake shop, that we are suburban astronauts
- who just shot at a paper plate target
- like a white, punctured moon.
- The poet holds a gun in the morning
- and shakes, with the same fallen limb,
- the knowing hand of Agnes Varda that very night
- in New York where the faces of her film
- beam at you in the most affectionate kind of love
- which is love without sound or dialogue.
- Varda is a small woman, sharp like a radiant heat
- dressed in magenta, a ring of Saturn
- around her head and she is telling me
- something about my hand when she shakes it:
- Megan, she seems to say the name that never meant
- anything to me but who she knows
- (and my mother knows) is very much me.
- There is nothing here to defend and everyone is in love.
- Here, her hand says, Megan, you do not need the gun.
