Hysteria

H
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: 'If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ...' I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Thoughts on One’s Head by William Meredith
William Meredith
(In Plaster, with a Bronze Wash) A person is very self-conscious about his head.
It makes one nervous just to know it is cast
Read Poem
0
102
Rating:

The Egoist by William H. Dickey
William H. Dickey
Popped from the womb, he began gathering property
extorted from his wet nurses by threatening

to turn blue in the face and die. Everyone gave in.
His mother dressed him in guava-colored lace crinolines

his father obligingly retired to the Côte d’Azur
siblings were disposed of by the Beast of the Bassinet.

Coextensive with the world, his hands become The Hands,
his mouth The Mouth, his dingus The Dingus.
Read Poem
0
95
Rating:

The Screen of Distance by Barbara Guest
Barbara Guest
1

On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance
is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes
and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic
eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in
the room where the screen waits suspended like
the frame of a girder the worker will place upon
an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with
Read Poem
0
116
Rating:

Conscription Camp by Karl Shapiro
Karl Shapiro
Your landscape sickens with a dry disease
Even in May, Virginia, and your sweet pines
Like Frenchmen runted in a hundred wars
Are of a child’s height in these battlefields.

For Wilson sowed his teeth where generals prayed
—High-sounding Lafayette and sick-eyed Lee—
The loud Elizabethan crashed your swamps
Like elephants and the subtle Indian fell.
Read Poem
0
111
Rating:

Nocturne Militaire by Thomas McGrath
Thomas McGrath
Miami Beach: wartime Imagine or remember how the road at last led us
Over bridges like prepositions, linking a drawl of islands.
Read Poem
0
136
Rating: