Adriana

painting by fernando botero

Adriana

He met Adriana in Los Angeles
on a warm spring day in 1946,
at the Hollywood USO.

She had young men encircling her
like a peppery garland of testosterone;
each one eager to dance with her,
to put their sweaty hands
on her shapely butt, and feel
her firm breasts pressing hotly
through their dress uniforms.

She danced to Glenn Miller
like an indefatigable sprite;
her long curled blond tresses
bouncing, barely held in check
by blue ribbons, her short black
pleated skirt swirling high enough
to reveal her silk stocking tops
with a flash of milk-white thigh
devastatingly sensual teasing
above her black garters, her tight
red sweater scoop-necked with just
a solid preview of her cleavage--
a dream girl.

Thirty years later she was asleep
beside him on their bright picnic quilt
in a warm meadow near an orange orchard
with fruits, bread, and cheese morsels
spread out deliciously between them,
as he sat upright staring thoughtfully
out at the Angeles Crest, barely poking
its peaks up out of the blue haze
hanging heavy in the California air.

Then he shifted his gaze west toward
the sea, remembering the Destroyer
that sank beneath him at the battle
of the Coral Sea in ’42, the fifty days
a tiny flotilla of life rafts had clung together
awaiting rescue, when he had a 32” waist
and could make love four times a day,

and the rapturous joy they had shared
with the birth of each of their three sons,
as they moved into the Valley, and
corpulence had become their permanent
profile, and smiling at how beautiful
his wife still was naked.

Glenn Buttkus

January 2012

Listed as #7 over on dVerse Poetics

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