There goes my heart again, hurtling like a Nebraskan cow
sucked into a tornado’s vacuum, all because silly Colonel Brandon
has happened to wander into Barton Park
at just the right moment: Kate Winslet’s bent at the piano
playing poco adagio con serenitta, her voice clear
as a champagne flute, and judging by the look on his face
old Brandon’s bewitched, Cupid’s zapped him
with love’s cattle prod, or, more likely, with a quick
Petrificus totalus! because hey, that’s Alan Rickman
in the Victorian coat and cravat,
though even without the black cape
and sinister leer, he still comes off a bit dour.
This is what happened with Pride and Prejudice:
the sweeping British hills and seascapes
and darlings of the Academy Awards
encouraged me to become a roadside hedgehog,
to curl in on myself as the others zipped by.
I didn’t even like Austen’s books –
all those people ever have to do
is fall in love – and, as a matter of fact,
I’ve haven’t met one Brit I’d invite
to tea: not Mabel, the bucket-flinging brat
who crushed my castles on the shores of Key West,
not that drunk from Bristol who asked
if I were named for a certain Playboy Bunny, and certainly not
Dave, the macarena-crazed dolt
who threw his limbs into a wiggling frenzy
and knocked me away from the arms of Juan Pablo
at that club in Buenos Aires. Juan Pablo! who murmured
passages from Sartre and Camus
while trying to slip his hand up my dress. And that’s the problem,
these boys today are too well-versed
in existentialism: why bother, when the world is enamored
with its void of pointless violences,
when you can never hope to know me since
I can never know myself, and our love affair
will end like any other in a self-induced
diabetic coma? I’m a sucker for
sexy talk like that. Still, something in me wishes
the heart could be capable of all teleologies,
that when I walk with you into the night
I could fall once again for your respiratory system,
your lungs swelling like inflatable rafts
onto which I long to cling.
Maybe that’s why I keep watching
Professor Snape brood over Kate’s sweet song,
why I keep rewriting this love poem, though somewhere
fires are blooming across the sky, another soul succumbs
to the body’s blitzkrieg. Repetition of the absurd
still incites that harlot, hope.
Pause the movie, love; put on your coat
and take my hand. When we walk into the night,
a glittering of snow
will settle upon us like Kate’s last few notes,
but I’ll only hear
the ensorceling sound of your breath
falling, now rising,
softly, softly.