--- C A R M E N   B U T C H E R

I want fat poems hurled flat against an ocherous hand in France. 
I want poems written by you never met a Kennedy or the Queen (but on scholarship and magic).
I want poets adding up numbers on license plates, toes leaving Mexican cliffs sun-
blind when divisible by 3. (You know the trick?)
I like poets to have an armoire of uneaten peaches behind their left ear.
(Uncertain in a state-park sort of way.)
Who might think (if not write)--it squeezed my heart like olive oil. 
Who never set foot in Iowa except to drive through the corn. Miles of corn.
Who've met the "I" and sometimes even liked her.
Ever crash into the white dictionary a short drive south of Half-Moon Bay?
Hopped on carved mindfulness from tidal pool to tidal pool, exclaiming at crabs
who only move sideways? (Should I escape evasion by confronting it, perhaps?) 
I mean not Clint Eastwood's and Kevin Costner's Pebble Beach but that 
below the mere gravelly parking lot, gravel I bought where a leaping lexicon 
of black-rock sprays.
I want poems no half-ass professor or no top-hat editor will like (timid lips that 
always kiss, well, not exactly fuzz).
Smell that extra virgin green pouring in the sun from that tall dark bottle and love 
again the Italian pizza you had one London day beside a candle in a glass in a 
bistro where the wallpaper never was speaking English and you were happy 
to have traveled on a Fulbright all the way from a church pew in Georgia to 
drink red wine with a young Brit brown-curl gorgeous.
I want 3 poets who can romance 11 with intelligence and roses.
Or just one who will make the poem something Kolya would like. A neon red, nine-
dollar yo-yo stolen at the pool, returned or found. An afternoon swimming 
or fishing (in a boat) with Father. Moscow's snow, aunts, uncles, 
grandmothers, and that ping-pong table from Mother's office. Here hear me 
say I admire your careful blond ears--as if chatting with a species 3 decades 
older than you from Pluto is as simple as jumping speedbreakers on the well-
oiled Free Spirit bike you redeemed when a neighbor moved. Some say you 
are shy. Not I. I know you will be an artist when you say; I know because 
my front and Bach eyes already see you are a 7 at 7.