After Sappho’s Fragment 31

Whacked with a bat
in Dolores Park for his wallet,
Ari can't make new memories.
All day he lives in Then,

except when his wife of three
decades stands in the doorway.
In her dun-colored muumuu,
sandals from Thrift-Co
that leave enough room
for her hammertoes,
she’s Aphrodite.

He whoops and sighs,
tries to unlock his Geri-chair,
his face flushed, then pale
as maiden grass.

Suddenly he’s mute,
his tongue,
broken by beauty.

That's when I'd give
my temporal lobe,
my hippocampus whole,
for his cheap blue gown;
                                
to gaze upon that love again
by which one is first made,
inflamed, destroyed,

then raised
to aerial ash
again and again.

© by Dawn McGuire.
Used with the author’s permission.