LOLITA'S MOTHER

A particularity of bird,
Your stomach is cabbage green, You are
A bag of bespeckled moons, but zipperless.

My lost ring you took and hammered into a crown on the anvil of air.
You have probably aged, have certainly become fat,
A dictionary noun
Like Lolita’s mother, trapped in your house,
Screaming into the telephone for pizza.
Ironic. The unrecognizable milk-fed genius
Of “three quarters of the way up”
Is now thought to be a nobody.

My arms snatch at you like a python
And miss. You, peeking from your temple,
Demurely spit on the wrinkled sheet of the bed,
Mistaking it possibly for the sea,