Orange Poem

Ok, here's my entry in the Great Orange Challenge of '04:


Visiting Orange

You'll never write a poem about this place,
you say, coaxing maraschino stems to knot
with your tongue. Nothing rhymes with orange.

I could try to explain why I no longer rhyme,
but we've moved on past the enormity of Wal-Mart
on the former outskirts to post mortem the marriage

of your second cousin fifty miles north of here,
the one with the cows, whose wife finally left him
with permanent moons from her flawless french nails.

We shake up the icemelt in our glasses, quote
our old code for romantic disaster, That's love,
American style, almost in unison with yesterday:

little rebels in red Nehru jackets,
suicide blonde from the same bottle
in a bouffant hairdo hometown

far too small to let us get away with drinking here.
Now you mouth a hot pink Sock it to me every time
the barman idles by with another happy hour Tootie Fruity.

I tell you a guy named Richard Hugo wrote poems
about places like this -- he said, Leave in a flashy car
and wave goodbye. You laugh and wave goodbye

to the bar halfway down Henderson as we weave
through last season's lace of morning glory
and petunia frizzled down from iron baskets

just in time to grab our Junior Mints
for a revival of Lawrence of Arabia
at the three-dollar theater.

After, we sit silent twenty minutes
in the muddled neon sunset flooding
from Ed Flaherty's topless bar.

Desert has filled up our mouths,
wider than memory measured it,
nothing there to hide behind.