Karen Hildebrand
I’m a Skinny Black Cat in Pearls
i
Seeking to date someone with high energy—
May play pickleball, enjoys golf. May
swindle you of your retirement stash.
Remember high school make-out parties?
Geeky sophomores, reeking of Ban roll-on,
locking braces in the dim faux wood basement
of a girl whose parents had to be insane.
My latest was with the Golden Bachelor
beside Gowanus Canal, as if the Seine,
lamppost lit. Warm pudding of his lips
on mine, his fingers, my wattle, shy animal
of the groin waking the mists of Camelot,
my forehead surely flashing purple neon:
Scam me, I’m a sucker for love.
ii.
I’m a sucker for love— morning sun shower,
triplet note from a bird I can’t place.
He loves me. He loves me. He loves me.
A butterfly lights on the purple skirt of a petunia
in a line of a poem not mine. Head for heels
my Provincetown romantic ideal, attic
guest room, charming low pitch, picket fence,
petal-strewn. I’ve banged my head four times.
Blue changes its hue given water
bodies, passing light. We could make
a career of looking for love. You show me yours,
I’ll show you mine. You offer ballast, I
counter, root. If this were Wednesday, I’d have said,
Fine. Today is Friday. Please give me more.
iii.
Please give me more, says the panhandler,
palm out at the door, Mr. Coco’s fruit stand.
Everything used to be a buck—
cantaloupes fit for bowling, billiard balls,
these unripe tomatoes. It’s raining
mangoes. They roll to the curb, fat
as bad choices. Boom splat, squishy
flesh, my fingers. Here we meet again.
Wednesday is trash night in the vestibule
of happily-ever-after. I fling a compost
bin to the curb, ring my little bell,
ding-a-ling-ling, gimme a scratch.
I’m a cat. I’m a cat. Let me in.
I’m a skinny black cat in pearls.
iv.
A skinny black cat in pearls at the door,
Hurricane Lee Hulking offshore, blinding
sun, sky unambiguous blue. In the end
there wasn’t much unless you count
the wind in my ears. Reader, he said no.
As we lined up on the wharf, last ferry out,
a grey seal popped its head from the drink,
look at these little pussies, running away.
Presumptuous to equate emotional weather
with climate change, put words in the mouth
of a beast. Here at the outermost tip
of the Cape, bit of a pitch, saved
by low tide. Weather events grow bigger,
my own subdue. I can’t work up a good cry.
v.
Talk about a good cry, it’s been raining four days.
Ophelia this time, subtropical storm,
misled, jilted, scorned. Is it fury or grief?
Were I given to drama, I’d wail for the drowning
in Hamlet, the drugging in O’Neill. I might
conflate Ophelia with Eurydice, whose story
is a lesson in trust. When you talk, you repeat
what you already know. All the lovesick creatures
of the Pantheon swell to flood gutters and sewers,
rage the subway stairs, drench weddings
of anyone rash enough to see roses
where there is but an absence of thorn.
He flipped me like a blue oxford shirt on a hanger,
laundered and shapely, but not for today.
vi.
Not for today, what the hell?
It’s been an ice age, you wooly mammoth.
I should have known when you confessed
you didn’t evolve. Maxim spouter, hiber-
nator, feet steeped in tar. Had you
and I found comfort in each other
there might be hope for the war. If you listen
the Dalai Lama said, you will learn something new.
You’re not the only one who didn’t plan
ahead. Consider me erosion of shale from years
of flash flood. What I mean to say is I don’t
regret a minute. I bared my heirloom lace
despite the furies’ shriek. That you
said no, makes it no less a win.
vii.
No, less than a win. In the tiki bar
of my desire, lavender cocktail umbrellas
tease me with their toothpick spines. The couple
to my right travels the world looking
for tiki and they’ve landed here, where mai-tai’s
are named for pirate cartoons. I am Lai Lani
Volcano; you, Sidewinder’s Fang.
Dollar bills flutter the grass roof
as if to sail this ancient ship.
We are as much shaped by love denied.
I saw my father’s face in the frost of my glass,
watched his dashing smile slide
to pool on the bar. Every ending
is also a beginning. Someone seeking.
Karen Hildebrand
Karen Hildebrand is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books) and she writes about dance for Fjord Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival podcast. Recent poems appear in Defunct, LEON, Maintenant, No Dear, Pigeon Pages, Poetry Bay, Quarter After Eight, Scoundrel Time, Slipstream, South Florida Poetry Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Braving the Body, an anthology forthcoming from Harbor Editions. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.