The Love Cook -- Ron Padgett

(Poem #216)The Love Cook Let me cook you some dinner.    Sit down and take off your shoes    and socks and in fact the rest    of your clothes, have a daquiri,    turn on some music and dance    around the house, inside and out,    it’s night and the neighbors    are sleeping, those dolts, and    the stars are shining bright,    and I’ve got the burners lit    for you, you hungry thing. -- Ron Padgett

Glow -- Ron Padgett

(Poem #189)Glow When I wake up earlier than you and you are turned to face me, face on the pillow and hair spread around, I take a chance and stare at you, amazed in love and afraid that you might open your eyes and have the daylights scared out of you. But maybe with the daylights gone you'd see how much my chest and head implode for you, their voices trapped inside like unborn children fearing they will never see the light of day. The opening in the wall now dimly glows its rainy blue and gray. I tie my shoes and go downstairs to put the coffee on. -- Ron Padgett

Album -- Ron Padgett

(Poem #2)Album The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt. -- Ron Padgett