1 New Poem

Take That Waltz

It is the rosewater left untaken

off-wave tone of blinking midnight clocks

in musty hotel rooms, beaten in blinkered

cross-eye stance

for unspooling rooms, could be

drank in darkly as Tudor beam

ceilings a party conference decision tables,

ever-weighting between blinded scales

and lost in years as all.

Still, you stain,

port dark, wine deep:

the wish to have taken up some sport

of gentlemen's hours, drivers at dusk

across coattail creases, distraction in

letterhead pitches, in grinding peacetime.

In hours entranced by garden trestle vines,

shuttering possible pasts behind doorsteps' flutter,

it is ever the better a dance to take.