Sky-View Drive-in: Memory of Psychotherapy

EUGENIA PLUNKETT

SKY-VIEW DRIVE-IN: MEMORY OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

"The Wedding Bell Blues," not what some black drummer

somewhere would call the "blues," exactly, more

pop than that, erodes my special summer

tonight, says what's in store

for me, to my brave intuition, who's

alive still after the psychiatric blues.

In that "flag ship" he called his Galaxie

Five-hundred, we went riding toward the "Gay

Deceivers", while, much happier than they,

much happier than he

and I, some fifty-or-so gay deceivers,

in dark parked flag ships, tug boats, floats and buoys,

made it with indefatigable joys

numbering fifty-all. Midnight believers,

they each and every knew you cannot lose

if you can last out wedding bells or blues,

a rather either-or sort of arrangement,

it seems. Bill, I will say of this estrangement,

this strange determinism in the fall

of things, I wish we'd all

come clean. Loves, two by two, know love is pan-

theistic in the major dreams of man.

There's no accounting, then, for my regret

that you were someone else's. I cannot forget

through oceans of brave sailor-lovers sailing

the evening with a soaring siren wailing

to us inside our flag ship-that somewhere

you watch those gay deceivers, through the twilight air,

about you and before you. And I know you think.

As always. If I join her crooning in my soul,

and look at him and croon, and if the bell-buoys toll,

and if I smile and weather it, or sink

to an inept embrace tonight, I wink,

later in dreams, at you. And I can say,

knowing that somewhere you believe

me, once is for all time somehow, now we've

psyched out the world together-and been gay.

Structure

39 lines · 9 stanzas