Angel Food

1.

Missing from the public pool like a tooth,

That half-naked fairy girl

Who swims as if running for her life

In the high prairie, swinging her head

Side to side to keep going,

See where, breathe better,

Her belly tenderly doughy, nearly

Marsupial, the rest hairlessly smooth

Angel food cupcakes spilling

From the ramekins of her loose top,

Imaginary mushrooms in the inadequate

Cul de sac of her cloth bottom.

Shy lamb, fearful of the world's

Interest in her unseen fleece,

Marching from the women's

Locker room already wearing

2.

Her swim goggles and rubber cap,

To avoid eye-contact, to see

Who's staring, perhaps puzzled pleasantly

By a wolf's fascination

In her absence in the water,

By the presence of her gap. Don't

Pee on me, I plead, meaning please,

Already breathless and dizzy

From reaching for what's missing,

Swimming in this oblong box

As if its wet frame held a portrait

Of the universe, over my head

In the clear, slippery, poisonous,

Potentially deadly, my portion

Of earth's stupidity for a nymph's

Jellyfish silk, rubbery ivory and pearls.

Kenneth Rosen is the author of seven collections of poems, beginning with Whole Horse (Braziller Poetry Series, 1970), and most recently The Origins of Tragedy (CavanKerry, 2002). Rosen hiked the length of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains over thirty years ago, and was particularly charmed to discover Crag Camp at timberline on the edge of King Ravine, after hiking in a dark hallucinatory rain over black rocks intermittently marked with yellow blazes from Monroe Hut past Thunderhole Junction and down Mt. Adams to Crag Camp's lone gaslight twinkling ambiguously from beyond the gathering shoulder-high pines. Rosen and his wife returned to Randolph, NH on July 31st, 2004, night of the blue moon and a downpour extrordinaire — the northern summits rip the stomachs from slow-moving, low-lying clouds — so that he could review the logbooks maintained at Crag Camp, now in the custody of the Randolph Mountain Club archivist, particularly the entrees made in behalf of G.A.S. (Goddard Alpine Society), by the pseudonymous Grey Dellwood and friends, gnomic meditations on the cultural alternatives represented by military service in Viet Nam and psychedelic self-indulgence in the mountains. This was the era when a song such as "Coming Down Again" (from GOATS HEAD SOUP) magically refracted one's most private erotic, psychic, and geo-physical exigencies, the communion of chaos and ataraxia made popular, in an old-fashioned sense, by substances known variously as Orange Sunshine, Purple Windowpane, ad infinitum. Rosen and his wife endeavored to sojourn at the cabin described in the poem — checking it twice, to see if there'd been some mistake — but eventually Rosen's wife seized the bull, as it were, by the horns, and explained to its sturdy country proprietors, how the cabin would not be meeting their needs—Rosen, at that point, in the passenger seat, judiciously slouched below windshield level, his wife, of course, returning to their car to do the driving.

When your head is in the highlands
All other hearts are desert islands, etc.