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Burning In The Bush

Widowed recently, the lady said:
“I mustn’t rush back to the world, ”
but took him to her marriage bed
to show him hairs that all were curled.

“It seems that she’s not thinking straight, ”
he thought, and very soon began to push
where it was clear she couldn’t wait,
since she was burning in her bush.

Whenever we are feeling lonely
the truth longer seems clear-cut,
and words we say are never only
the truth, the whole truth, nothing but.

Inspired by Robert Pinsky’s review of Elmore Leonard’s “Road Dogs” in the NYT Book Review, May 31,2009 (“Playing Dirty: Elmore Leonard’s latest novel stars three familiar voices in a twisting tale of seduction and betrayal”:
The virtuoso storyteller Elmore Leonard has been rightly praised for his technique: hot, fast narrative, tasty dialogue, strokes of character so quick they’re invisible, never a detail that doesn’t move things ahead. It’s wonderful how much Leonard can do with a five-¬syllable sentence like “She left with the check.” But a good book should also be about something. Although it isn’t always mentioned, Leonard’s books have subjects. “Road Dogs” is about the varying degrees of truth and baloney in human relationships. Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal. Droll and exciting, enriched by the self-aware, what-the-hell-why-not insouciance of a master now in his mid-80s, “Road Dogs” — underlying its material of sex, violence and money, and beyond its cast of cons and thugs and movie stars — presents interesting questions….
In a similar way, Jack’s thoughts when he’s about to have sex with a recently widowed movie star, or not, resemble those of a screenwriter. At poolside, after a dip, about to change clothes, she has said, “I’ve been thinking. I might be rushing my return to the world”: “He turned to look at her and said, ‘I know, ’ nodding, showing he was wise as well as patient. He thought he might as well continue once he started, get it all out, and said, ‘I understand.’ He said there was no reason to hurry, it would work out or it wouldn’t. They liked each other and they’d get to it one day. The way he said it was, ‘We’ll express our love one day, ’ and thought he should have said ‘show our love, ’ but didn’t like that either. He should’ve said, they’d get to it, with a grin, and let it go at that.”

5/31/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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