Piccola Commedia

He is no one I really know,

The sunned-charred, gaunt young man

By the highway's edge in Kansas

Thirty odd years ago.

 On a tourist-cabin veranda

Two middle aged women sat;

One in a white dress, fat,

With a rattling glass in her hand,

Called "Son, don't you feel the heat?

Get up here into the shade."

Like a good boy, I obeyed,

And was given a crate for a seat

And an Orange Crush and gin.

"This State," she said, "is hell."

Her thin friend cackled, "Well, dear,

You've gotta fight sin with sin."

"No harm in a drink; My stars!"

Said the fat one jerking her head.

"And I'll take no lip from Ed,

Him with his damned cigars."

Laughter. A combine whined

On past and dry grass bent

in the backwash; liquor went

Like an ice pick into my mind.

Beneath her skirt I spied

Two sea-cows on a floe.

"Go talk to Mary Jo, son,

She's reading a book inside."

As I gangled in at the door

A pink girl, curled in a chair,

looked up with an ingénue stare.

Screenland lay on the floor.

Amazed by her starlet's pout

And the way her eyebrows arched,

I felt both drowned and parched.

Desire leapt up like a trout.

"Hello," she said, and her gum

Gave a calculating crack.

At once, from the lightless back

Of the room there came the

 grumble

Of someone heaving from bed,

A Zippo's click and flare,

Then, more and more apparent,

The shuffling form of Ed,

Who neither looked nor spoke

But moved in profile by,

Blinking one gelid eye

In his elected smoke.

This is something I've never told

And some of it I forget.

But the heat! I can feel it yet,

And that conniving cold.

That heat and cold at the end of the poem are suggestive, I hope, of Dante's Inferno where everything is both
very hot and very cold.