Poetry: Selections from David Sapp

The Origin of Affection

Dad’s suits

And shirts

Wrapped in

Dry cleaner’s plastic

Slid slippery

A deluge cascading

From the bed

To the floor

Mom fished

Hangers and all

From the closet

Pitched apparel

And him – so much

Chum overboard

There were other

Auguries in the storm:

Flying coffee cups

Distressingly incongruous

Torrents of profanity

My sister and I

Noticed in spates

The disappearance

Of hunting rifles

(And civility and

Attentiveness – humor

You’d think this

Would have done it)

Somehow suddenly

We apprehended

An irreparable inundation

And love sluicing

Away from the origin

Of affection

Cowboy Boots

That first Christmas

After our family busted up

Up icy rickety steps

In an upstairs apartment

Painted a sickly green

Because it was cheap

There were no stables

Or green pastures

Certainly no horses

To break – no cows

To rope and brand

 

Still my little sister

Got cowboy boots

Beneath the tree

She could only

Pretend to be a cowpoke

Riding her bike

Around the block

Over broken sidewalks

 

That first night

She wore her boots to bed

Toes hung over the edge

After finally falling asleep

Dad took them off

A few hours later

He looked in

And sure enough

She was sleeping

Dreaming with her

Boots on again

Naughty

Silent in our fascination

But unanimous in our

Abhorrence of girls girls girls

On the first of many

Endless warm days

School let out for summer

Five or six of us tramped

Boldly through the woods

I don’t know why

(None drafted a rationale)

We shed our clothes

And swung from thick

Wild grape vines

Bald skinny boy bodies

Scrawny little savages

Flying through the jungle

Our plucky nakedness

An impulse an instinct

Quickened by a redolence

Of black soil moldering wood

The primitive rarely gleaned

From books or desks

A defiance against propriety or

A vague notion of naughty

An act secret from and

Which would certainly

Shock our mothers

This and That

In love

However unlikely

What if we

Simply relented

Surrendered

Unreasonable expectations

So much – too much

This and that

And gave all blather

The old heave ho

Embraced one another’s

Obsessions – imperfections

Our mutual suffering?

There’s no need

To prove our worth

We’ll chat aimlessly

At the kitchen table

We’ll make love

With the windows

Wide open

On bright afternoons

Outdoing each other

In passion only

I Surrender

Still shell-shocked

After the war

I surrender

(Though I never

Brandished a weapon

Relished a bloodlust)

A thoughtful abdication

Certainly I’m not

The contemplative monk

I’m now simply merely

A gadfly a shut-in

I relinquish you

I give in I give up

On you and you and you

My chum my acquaintance

My colleague my sibling

My hoi polloi my

Exquisitely flawed humanity

Quite frankly you

No longer measure up

(And apparently

Neither do I

However my expectations

Were low too low)

Let us enjoy capitulation

A mutual respite

A silent regard

Across the battlefield

That will do

David Sapp is a writer, artist, and professor, who lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.