Like Bridgette

January 20, 2012 by Tim Ruane 4 Comments

Like Bridgette

Juliet is gone for the week,

So I am left with a poem, mourning—

Two girls collecting their bagels,

With curly hair and a pony tail.

Yet I can’t see them,

For I need glasses.

Love is a dead word,

I’ve said it before,

So all I have to offer is my left ankle.

I’d take the curly one

Or the pony tail too,

For they,

Over there, sitting by the café’s fire,

Take no notice of me.

They are more interested

In their bagels.

Should I approach and offer?

“I shall make you secure, girls.

The state gives me $1,962.36 a month,

And I bake cherry pies;

I speak Hindi, too.

We could go down

To the National Gallery of Art on Sundays

And watch weird art films

At 2:30 for free.

I bet you, too, love Andre Derain.”

Quasimodo would have more luck;

Still, I am in love.

Their scarves and bracelets and shee-shee boots

Are almost as alluring

As a young Bridgette Bardot,

Scarcely clad,

In her queen bed in the morning.

About Tim Ruane

Tim Ruane is an artist and writer. He is a graduate of Georgetown University, where he studied English and art, and has worked as a chief copy editor in the editorial department of The Washington Post, where he has also worked as a freelance photographer. He has written hundreds of poems, two novels a number of short stories. His photographs have been published by The Washington Post, Simon & Schuster and The Good Men Project. He has shown his photographs at Potomac MD Public Library and is scheduled to be published in ShareArt LA, Circumfleks Magazine and Splinter Literary Journal. He will have an exhibition of his photographs in September at the offices of Prudential FedRealty in Washington D.C. Mr. Ruane lives and works in Garrett Park MD, just outside Washington D.C. USA.