(for my ongoing Two by Two series)
DANCING ON NEW YEAR’S EVE AT DAVE AND SHEILA’S by W.S. Di Piero
“Everybody’s looking for something”
and everything smells good.
My sweating partner’s hips
push harder into mine,
tequila yeasting through our skin
and we’d lick each other dry,
drink more, do it again
while blue lamps twitch
between the others lost,
until someone at midnight
kills the music, calls us
to the front door where we grab
and kiss whoever’s near,
squeezed out into the night
where woolly pops like corks
or muffled distant gunshots
are gunshots in fact, high times,
bullets to the stars.
They won’t fall to earth here
where in June mysterious
citron lilies bloom, a perfume
more intense than lemons.
How did they get here?
Eyewitness News tells us
what guns cost beyond
the freeway. We smell ourselves,
the grand cedar by the door,
peanuts, booze, and sweat.
How can we not love them?
When the music snaps on again,
we weave back to the floor
adrift in each other’s arms,
and love it more, that constancy
of beat and song,
she presses her mouth
to my ear, rubs harder with me
and sings We’re here because
we’re here because we’re here.
(from Brother Fire, 2004, Knopf)
Chris Bronsk 