Advertisement

Winning Poems: The Moods of Summer

the cracks on the tennis court:

your poise was shattered and you gawked

after the perverse ball--

starkly aboriginal in your cloroxed suit.

You did a spring-rite on your father's lawn

Advertisement

(it wasn't a lawn at all, but a hybrid

of a pool table and a football field).

At dinner, new-born from the shower in evening dress,

I hungered for you across a tablepiece of peonies,

a sun-baked lobster stretching my pegged claws.

In a teal sheathe, you were the proudest

of your father's prize peonies.

Cryptic, idle, he'd quadrupled your mother's ancestral fortune,

investing it all in IBM. Now

he had three gardeners to help him tend his beauties.

Advertisement