TANGO ALTO
Welcome to
the public
Freudian Slip Where a
drunken
boat of symbols
Can be launched with all-night
Deck dancing and tattered lanterns.
Play more
tangos for saxophone,
Por favor, let’s celebrate
The color that a fellow player
Cannot express,
Make everyone misbehave.
Charter a
cruise to find the IF-GOD,
That “uncertainty figure”,
Everyone whispers to.
Dance with a hundred Fates,
Wanda Weird,
All her modern American and
Post-modern friends,
Her gross behavior groupies,
Hoping to recover women’s history
In statuary with poked out eyes.
As the ship
steams out of the harbor
A couple may begin their beguine,
Because Man is a weak
symbol,
A milonga for three,
The unique outcome of drink and travel.
The weather
in Buenos Aires
Is thunderous,
A place out of the rain to lick salt
And suck limes.
Men like haunting the wiles of the
wind, Shouting this and that
In the rising and stinking sun.
He lifts his
brim to the gaze of a woman,
The brew of
his works
A twilight wine-cooler,
More turbulent than the chemistry
Of a needy look.
But, she
runs off to grieve
On her sensual sofa,
Only to meet up with
More predictable cruelties,
Leaving behind her imponderable
Strangeness.
Women have
colonized
Every window scene
Until A man cannot
escape
The breeze of female motion.
Yet, his
pristine view
Is cluttered with the artificiality
Of unnatural yard-work,
Feats of a common laborer.
He would set
his ideal of woman
Next to an S.U.V.,
Between pink plastic flamingoes
And pedestrian concerns,
Bordered by curbs and gutters,
Edged with shrubs and mulch
And a white picket fence,
Her wet apron drooping
As she listens to the slop of water
In the furrows by the house.
Disgusted
with their own
Fortifications and breastworks,
Men get away to spend a week
Shouting amazement
At every floral-skirt flirt,
Fore and aft exhaustion,
Every quip and drip
Of moisture in the tropical mix.
They abandon
the stateroom,
Get lost in the shuffle board.
Search corridors for steerage
And other curious gatherings.
Look for that Mary-o-something ,
Gal in a hat last seen aft
By the elbow bend of an air shaft
Fife music noodling up from below.
Men get
comfortable in exotic
Settings beside a potted palm
Holding onto any reason to toast
Friends across a whispering lounge.
Men stay
quiet
While only the spit of a torch
Or an occasional crackle
Of afternoon rain intrudes,
Just before
high tango
And its urgent caress instructs them
In the discipline of love,
That emptiness occurring,
Just before the universe fills in.
