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Spring Fever

If she never called you, all this time,
one day she will, and thank God 
you're alone
when it happens, her voice warm
and unchanged, as if
the years were only a redeye flight away,
and all she wants to say 
(she says) is that she hopes you're okay,
that she loves you still, as fiercely
as ever,
and something else she never told you
before: that she wrote two
plays about you, where you appear as
"Renaldo,"
an outlaw like you she says, but how are
you, are you well (and when
you say) pretty fair, but changed, so terribly
changed, the teeth 
gone now, replaced with gleaming hardware
that gives you one of those loopy
Gable smiles,
and the body, well, the body, 
you wouldn't recognize it 
nowadays, creases and folds everywhere, 
not to mention the thirty
pounds of fat you lug around like
an eagle scout with a backpack, 
beyond change now,
settling into some strange new acceptance phase 
where, like Brando, like
so many of your former idols, you've begun 
to realize
that perhaps, after all, it's only 
the soul that matters.  
Oh God (she says) you know she doesn't care 
what you look like 
(and then) how she'd love 
to get together again, if only for an hour or so, 
just to let you know,
with her eyes, her words, her very breath, how
very much she loves you 
and always has, even though it's still so
impossible isn't it, (which is your cue, of course 
to arrange for a tryst) 
on her way back from Virginia, where
she's renovating a house, to Atlanta, where 
she lives with two roommates 
in the house
she previously renovated and lost money on 
three years earlier, 
but (you gotta) understand,
she says, how difficult any relationship has been 
after "ours," how impossible it is to relate 
to anyone, male or female,
and how she's had only bad luck with lovers, 
who will last maybe a night or two, 
but no one who could take the place of you, 
only she can't stay long, 
and no motel
okay because she will have the dogs 
with her, yeah, yeah, 
(she groans)
I got a minature pincher now and a yappy
pomeranian, but that's not all, 
forgive me, we can work around this okay?
I got a kind of hitchhiker too, this
wimpy blonde 
slave bitch I picked up at Monticello
that I have to keep tied up
in the back and change her Depends
every now and then 
so she don't get excited and piss on the seats 

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