Calendar

I wish the month had one more day, or even two,
or that, in truth, I might live it again, if only
so that Lola might be with me a little while longer.

Not that the month has been anything special
in regards to her. Most of it I spent
away, and even the time with her,

in the light of her devastating sultry gaze,
the fabulous black teddy, the sheer pink
negligee, the one visible garter snap,

the black hose, the carmine garter belt itself,
and the high-heeled pink mules, to say nothing
of the way she is seated on the golden

sheen of the loveseat, or the way the right
cup of the teddy creates the most perfect
ripple of flesh at the side of the breast

it lifts just enough to cast a slender shadow
between it and the other one, nor even
the way her left leg is tucked under the right

thigh or the way she holds the heel of that mule
in her right hand as though bracing herself
against herself. Even in all this glory,

the time I spent with her consisted of nothing
more than the occasional glance
until today. Tomorrow I’ll move on

to the beauty of next month, which like every one
but this one, is nameless, in a special way.
Four weeks ago, Firebelle; tomorrow, A Warm Welcome.

But today, dark already at four-thirty in the afternoon,
a snowstorm blowing in, Wednesday,
the thirtieth of Lola, 2011.

Robert Wrigley has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010). His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic, Barrow Street, and The New Yorker, and were included in the 2003 and 2006 editions of Best American Poetry. Wrigley’s honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Poets’ Prize, Kingsley Tufts Award, J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and six Pushcart Prizes. From 1987 until 1988 he served as the state of Idaho’s writer-in-residence.