Van Stanley

Portrait Poem: Ariadne

Lone Star’s got a new design — on the nostalgia route.
Ariadne puts hers down on my one mute speaker
while the active speaker’s got A Kiss In The Dreamhouse
jamming out of it.  Curious
Ariadne paces the room.  Examines everything:
ball point pen, a broken wooden rabbit ear off a doll
that I’d taken home from Saigon fifteen years ago …
Picks up a pocket journal.  A poetry book.  She’s got
these big glasses that seem to zoom her in on everything.
Where’s the story?  She’s asking me questions,
“What kind of old spice do you use?”  I don’t know, I say,
Classic.  Do you want some?  Ariadne glistens her
underarms.  Puts the thing down.  Sips the can of Lone Star.

She’s bored, I can tell.  Trying to strike up a conversation
when the response’s at the end of it.  I first met her—
I don’t know where.  She’s a reader.  & what’s profound
to me is when a reader can’t sit still.  “Yeah, I only look
through the pictures.”  Thumbs through a selection
from these old fantasy guides — the one about Ghosts
that my sister found dumpster diving at a dead man’s house.
Sips the Lone Star.  Puts the tall can down.

Ariadne’s got a high curve on her back
& she’s got her fist centered beneath it, at her spine
as she examines the room.  She smiles as she takes a seat.
Bites her thumbnail like the famous opener from Shakespeare.
Is this weird?  I want to ask her.  She shakes her head.
“No.”  Then gets up again.  Puts on a plastic king’s crown.
Golden yellow.  Crooked plastic gems.  Picks up a tear-out
from my old singer’s song-journal.  “I like Sophia.
I haven’t seen her in a long while.”  Then sets herself down
on the wood floor.  Picks up an issue of Licorice
a friend Erin’s home-made zine bound together by cut-outs
like a three-dimensional collage.  It’s these little windows
of light that tie us together, the poem, the Tarot, the collage.
Looks through the zine w her back on my bedroom door
& that crown on her head with her eyes like refugees
in those magnifying glass frames.  Takes off the crown.
Lets her hair down.  & checks inside the crown — like
Estragon’s boot in the Beckett play.  Nothing to be done,
says Vladmir — the first line.  & so the crown
rests on its head on her lap as she thumbs old drawings—
her left hand still dawdling a can of Lone Star beer.