Alice Fulton

Your Card Read "Poet-Mechanic"

the day you came    carrying a two-cylinder
slice of winter sun on your back,
toolcase with a greasy lock in
your spoon-shaped fingers
said you could do anything
with your hands &
went right to work, using
nouns as furniture, assembling
verbs into go-carts & motorcycles
till they roared off, followed by
a gang of sycophant adverbs.
The few transitives that remained
you turned into trampolines &
the expletives jumped on them all day.
When I watched you build "vituperate"
into a Harley-Davidson, I knew
it was goodbye.
Now there're just the adjectives
all day primping     singing choruses of popsongs.
I want to shake them & say
"Have you no respect
for the magnificent
lexicon you represent?" But "magnificent"
is in the bathroom
humming be-bop-a-lula.

--Alice Fulton, 

fr. Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, 1983