Turning Fifty

It was a beautiful day, rainy-gray, foggy, dismal, perfect.
I was so happy because there was nothing to do
and nowhere to go and no one to meet and never
in my life had I felt so empty and so full. I wanted to sneeze
or to cum. I wanted to die. I wanted a drink
though I hadn't had a drink in seventeen years.
But I didn't really want a drink, I just wanted
to climb a tree that no longer stood where it stood
and hide up there all alone in the top branches
and look down at a world that no longer looked
like it looked. Do you know what I mean? I mean the smell
of the rain before the rain and after the rain
as opposed to the rain itself. I walked up and down
the wet streets, looking at all of the houses
I would never set foot in. So easy to love them,
the shapes of those lives, those mystic triangles, their windows
like the dark eyes of beautiful young girls, who are too young
and too beautiful, forbidden and far-away and impossible as
life on Mars, all of the newspapers of Earth clamoring: Life on Mars!



Orgasms in Autumn

I used to think spring was the sexiest season.
But now I think it's fall
with all its burning
smells. And the musculature
of the impatient trees with their
red pants down around their knees
already--and all this talk of peak
foliage, which reminds me of all the talk
of orgasms, which are both the point and
so beside the point. I mean look
how beautiful. I mean feel how impossible--
everything building, everything climbing toward a high
tingling, a ringing in the ears, a flying
down through the world from the highest
branches. When I was a kid
I used to stand with my back to the trunks of trees
and count with my eyes wide open
(a kind of renunciation of hide-and-go-seek)
the number of leaves falling right now,
then, take off running, darting zigzag, trying
to catch them, to take them,
to snatch them out of the air mid-dance before
they could hit the ground. I played that game
for hours, years, sweaty and breathless, happy
just to be catching the falling beauty
in my hands, then letting it go, throwing it back
into the world.


Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from the Comstock Review, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, and the Frank Cat Press. His first full-length collection, Bending the Notes, is available from Main Street Rag. Visit his website at: www.paulhostovsky.com