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Riding in Cars, Bruising with Love

All day we’d shilly-shally in the sun

Backroads upstate between rapture and melancholy

You and your figs and the comings and goings of herbs

Your reckless driving was legendary

You’d love me on Wednesday but never on Thursday

By Friday you’d burn the Hudson on the cheapest ferry

A rare and risky and breezy thing

I gave you a pear when you upset the apple cart

Recklessly crashing into that triumphant farm stand

O how you roared out of key

Leaving me the doomed burst of summer

A rare and risky and breezy thing: your heart’s unreliability.

---

[Quite Naturally Cavafy is Lecturing Me]

Quite naturally

Cavafy is lecturing me,

it was the year he found himself without a job

and had set out for St. Lucia

gigging guided tours of the world’s only drive-in volcano;

the road to Qualibou is a long one

and St. Lucia one of only two countries in the world

named after a woman,

Cavafy is impressed that I know this

and like a golden youth drunk again

on rose-colored lips

sighs amorously through his thick black mustache

realizing, perhaps too late

that I’m not that kind of girl,

having failed to learn the language of the country

having taken the “drive-in” part quite literally

as Americans do

ignoring the catastrophic sunset

to mercilessly maw at my collapsing crater of KFC; 

and while the shade of his young body

had come to haunt him, I must admit

that if I hadn’t been waiting for the barbarians

or if I had known the other country

named after a woman

it might have shaped the meaning

of my life differently.

---

Kaiserwagon and Jubiläum

That was the summer I went to a party

and lost my head like Tolstoy in 1851,

I fell in love six times in an hour

and bought several horses which I didn’t need at all

and while I might have been the Third Man

or even the tenth, my love had eyes

like the Giant Ferris Wheel of Vienna;

we were absolutely modern

and although my paunch is beginning to bloom

you whispered zouzou zouzou in my ear

during our loop in the royal hunting grounds;

you had roots in an artesian well

and although it was the summer I went to a party

and bought several horses which I didn’t need at all

I called you my Beautiful Spring;

we spun in Kaiserwagon and Jubiläum

like a golden age of Jamesian drawing rooms

twelve to fifteen minutes the circle circuit of the wheel,

you even blew kisses to the crowd beside the orangery

as my heart hung outside the carriage

gripping a dangling rope between its teeth,

the flash of green when the sun sets

revealing as much as it conceals.

---

Bio:

Damon Hubbs writes poems about Thulsa Doom, Italo disco and girls who cry at airports. He’s the author of three chapbooks, most recently Charm of Difference, from Back Room Poetry). His latest work appears in Antiphony Journal, The Argyle Literary Magazine, BRUISER, Misery Tourism, Don’t Submit!, and elsewhere. Twitter @damon_hubbs

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