We Dance Around Mary

We dance around Mary like you suggested once
after bourbon, gin, vodka, and wine
after a thirty dollar chicken entrée and house salad—
Mary keeps proud-talking her children as
photographers, students, teachers—artists all.
She sings and sings.

Why can’t hot eyes fix where I want them?
Some of these ladies look pretty smooth in the dim
eventide like chardonnay in crystal
before one centered candle.
O these book-minded ladies,
their red sibilant lips know the irregular meter of my heart.

But Mary, Mary, her black skirt
flowered by gelignite greens, reds, pinks.
Mary keeps reading my own poem unaware.
She’s read my life, my death,
and I think of my own little sweetface,
five years old, home, asleep, she too singing dreams.