Don Giovanni

It is eighty degrees in December.

It is he, on one of his furloughs,

bringing himself — and hell — up to date.

My Don Juan, the better climber

(as the mercury yo-yos),

is in a newly roused state,

the world circumcised away

from an out-of-season bud

leaving at the scrupulous rim,

as it unfurls, a darker appliqué,

like O-positive frozen solid

at the sight of one’s resuscitated victim.

This rosebush assiduously forks over

its works where most grandifloras falter,

thriving as far into the year as Capricorn.

While named after a lover,

it decorates its own altar

and wields an extraordinary thorn:

once I saw it catch a football

in those semiquaver quasi-teeth;

it is three-headed, like Cerberus,

a hybrid drawing bloodlines from a root-ball

on hands all that’s impure lies beneath.

Hands can train it, barbarous

as it is, on an arbor, and I might like

to take its thick canes in harness,

first pouring cement as a base

(so it would know I meant business).

Always poised to strike,

they eventually undo their stays,

baying out like a window

of garnet, as at Chartres

(torture chamber in its basement,

or so I hear). I wonder how

such a daemon rose got its start,

what fairy tale explains its scent    ...    

And then I go out tonight

and find him, swiping right

on every pretty face in candlelight.

It is almost Christmas. Stacks

of square plates. (It’s an open plan.) Racks

of bottles. The whites and blacks,

clear glass, and stainless steel sieves

denote compliance with standards.

A wire basket of freckled pears

is transparency; sterilized knives

give full disclosure; and as regards

the stemware, due diligence dares

a slip, especially on chanteuses like these

salting down from state-of-the-art speakers.

(Or is it sugar?) Does the chorizo flambé

not deter him? Gold as all hell, Valkyries

stand tall with beer to the brim. Beakers

in Siren form flush with Chianti, if not ambi-

valence. Recalling the steel meshes

belting Monterosso’s

cliffs against the vox

Dei of the sea, the myth refleshes:

ordering, in the manner of heroes,

an Andromeda on the rocks.