Upon Going to a Vocal Recital at the University of Arizona
 

In the music department
I was always warned in hushed tones
over the shined brass bells of tubas or the oily
keys of communal brown upright pianos, never
date anyone in the choral studio—singers are more
trouble than they’re worth, none of them knowing
I had, before.

You were brilliantly lit, owning the stage with
your gentle pacing and the swishing of your
shining green gown. You concluded your compulsories
and delivered then a butter-smooth rendition
of a song sung to me a thousand times before,

as a baby and a boy before staunchly deciding I was ‘Dan,’

and from the She who sang it with a wink
from the stage at my high school’s senior showcase,

and the same She who over a tinny cordless phone
sang to me sitting on a dorm’s concrete back steps
my freshman year away from home,

and it seemed in the crowded concert hall
you sang it just for me: 

          Oh
                   Danny
                                Boy…

And sitting in the audience, it was impossible
not to want you: imagining you of transcendent high C
floating down the staircase at stage left, amidst
the thunderous applause to which you were so richly
entitled, beaming,
into my open arms.






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This is one of those poems where I've got to be careful at delinating the She from the You--both clearly enough and early enough. How do you think I negotiated that? How does it work outside of that? How's the imagery--flat, cliche?

Clouds Converged

We gon’ break this thing down in just a few seconds,
Now don’t have me break this thing down for nothing.
—OutKast, “Hey, Ya!”

Clouds rolled in everyway around our
favorite restaurant, dark gray and variegated
like a cat named Smoky.

The place was loud with Italian
music that somehow featured harmonica
and the din of the party of twelve behind us,

brightly dressed in billowing garments and
all over forty, all drunk. The clouds converged
from 270 degrees of sky, leaving only

a narrow avenue of escape. But it just
wouldn’t start raining. Our asymmetrically toothed
server dropped a tray of silver. Her lip quivered
in the gap where her left eye tooth wasn’t.

She was nervous because we said so little
Your uncut-emerald eyes streaked with candle
reflection, produced almost a tear but then none.

The play of parallel bolts behind you,
like four simultaneous oak trees revealed
from top to bottom, jigging a silent path from
cloud to ground was almost enough to save

what was otherwise as I expected: the quiet
between us except for the flat-as-a-tapeworm
intoned questions you didn’t want answered and
that broken, empty, head loll of defeat.

It was all so very reasonable and transparent. But
the clouds were different and the play
of lightening, even trapped within the eight
squares of two windows
                                         was brilliant.