Two Poems

Jim Natal

Wide Awake at 3 AM

Wide awake at 3 AM, the stars drew me out of bed. It was one of those cluster canopies that occur only on the clearest, coldest nights. I raised the blinds and half expected to see the Aurora Borealis as though this was Alaska and not Arizona. At the point the stars’ attraction became too strong to resist, I had been lying there fantasizing that my old dog had come back to visit me in the night, his face close to mine at the edge of the bed, big nose cold against my bare shoulder. I reached out from under the quilt to touch fur, so palpable was my envisioning—or maybe my longing. But, of course, he wasn’t there. The way my father is never there when I seek his advice. He never offered much when he was alive. Just example. I don’t know why he would provide it now. Maybe I never really asked, or he sensed that what I required was not his opinion but to make my own decisions. Either way, there were two parallel stars shining at equal intensity just above the juniper trees, and although there were multitudes of others I couldn’t keep from staring back.

Expands and contracts,
that nameless constellation;
light years between breaths.

***

An Ad on Late Night TV

An ad on late night TV touts a new “Girls Gone Wild” video: “50 Best Breasts Ever.” Despite my great admiration for the title’s internal rhyme and alliteration, I mull a question—does the video feature 50 girls or just 25? You know, truth in advertising. Bowing to network proprieties, the sample footage features grayed-out swatches across the chests and pubic regions of the oh-so-perky participants, reminiscent of the black bars across eyes in 1940s “dirty” magazines. One girl (and these are girls) flips up the top of her bikini; her breasts leap at the camera like tigers. Another girl on what appears to be the bed of an RV declares, “I am the hottest girl in America,” a claim that might be debated by the other 49 (or 24) subjects. These girls could be my daughter’s college roommates…or my daughter. How many fathers, in the interest of research, have gone so far as to order? Which sets up an interesting premise: what if the girl gone wild is yours?

Breast fascination—
amazing how it changes:
wife’s radiation.

Jim Natal Bio:

A monastery,
somewhere in the Zen Mountains:
a monk imagines

a city poet
who crushes a butterfly,
dreaming of monkhood.

jnatal@cableone.net

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