Never buy a car that prates instructions
like a Zen parrot with a sexy female voice; also never
stuff yourself with pizza before sex – fresh
blueberries are probably best. When gray
squirrels take over the attic, hording
walnuts that wake you inside
the bocce court of your plaster walls,
don’t avoid the killing that must be done. Same goes
for paper wasps nesting under the porch steps.
By all means, when your mind weeds grow back from the self-
doubt a hard-ass father planted in your heart, go find
a psychotherapist who can help you pull them
out by their roots; and if she tolerates
your rants against country-club Republicans and should
happen to moonlight as a coloratura
whose voice makes God weep, as well as a gourmand
who can whip up Reine de Saba
avec Glaçage au Chocolat with her eyes closed,
ask her to marry. If later
you find she turns a deaf ear to your
yelling up winding flights of a tumbledown
Victorian perched on a hillbilly slant
whenever you lose your keys or wallet,
rest assured you’ll grow old and happier
together in the comfort of a parlor
window air conditioner droning
away the stifling heat. If you’ve still got
a roving eye, trace this mantra nine
times into the steam on your bathroom
mirror upon waking: I don’t
do affairs or divorce to avoid what
will only bring a plague upon your house. Love
is hard enough but so much harder
when trying to hoe two rows at once. Turning sixty,
you’ll want to chuck poetry and run a country
filling station, yet there will suddenly be no more
fresh starts. Ah, friend. Let’s hightail it to that
one untrammeled sanctuary in Florida where we can stroll
all day among drowsing gators, spy wood storks stretched
out in full soar over a cypress swamp’s
sweet musk, and inhale enough chthonian
irony to deflate a fleet of Goodyear blimps.
