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R. Mumma
Date of Birth: 12/7/55
Location: Long Branch, NJ
Email: rickmumma@yahoo.com
Published in: Pif Magazine, New Jersey Poets
FLIRTATIONS ON BLACK VELVET
I know when you started to do this thing
with your eyes searching the eyes
of other innocents and bystanders
for an exchange of the light that radiates
from window to window
proclaiming here you are and there you are
and isn't it wonderful that we are
not dead yet.
If your husband saw you he'd think
it was a sexual thing because you
only seem to share this good news
with the virile and the male.
That may be a part of it (If this situation
were only slightly different, your eyes say,
there could be touching of bodies, and
somehow that suffices)
But I know that you started to do this thing
with your eyes on that morning when you looked out
at the daffodils and goldfinches and thought,
we can still lose all this with diplomatic breakdowns
and the sober touch on official buttons. Not
just the observer muted (as accepted from
quotidian heart attacks and bursts of random
gunfire and horsepower)
But her observations and the golden observed.
And from the background of this darkness
you find, and deliver, light.
Bright royal strokes on the void
(The household iconography of Elvis from the mystic
beyond represented in the depth of black velvet).
Voyagers resolving for us with your painted smiles
questions of eternal life.