Olives

“Dead people don’t like olives,”
I told my partners in eighth grade 
dancing class, who never listened 
as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two. 
 
The dead people I often consulted 
nodded their skulls in unison 
while I flung my black velvet cape 
over my shoulders and glowered 
from deep-set, burning eyes, 
walking the city streets, alone at fifteen, 
crazy for cheerleaders and poems. 
 
At Hamden High football games, girls 
in short pleated skirts 
pranced and kicked, and I longed 
for their memorable thighs. 
They were friendly—poets were mascots— 
but never listened when I told them 
that dead people didn’t like olives. 
 
Instead the poet, wearing his cape, 
continued to prowl in solitude 
intoning inscrutable stanzas 
as halfbacks and tackles 
made out, Friday nights after football, 
on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms 
with magnanimous cheerleaders. 
 
But, decades later, when the dead 
have stopped blathering 
about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze 
upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders 
waiting for hip replacements, 
while a lascivious, doddering poet, 
his burning eyes deep-set 
in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.