The White Ship (6) Poem by David McLansky

(6) Meeting


So many girls I'd left behind,
Unfaithful, dull, or proved unkind:
Uptown girls fired by career,
Party girls of shots and beer,
The worldly wise, the innocent,
The raucous and the reticent,
The leering checking my accounts,
The doubting fearing their amount;
Bohemians and wild exotics,
The straight-laced and repressed neurotics;
I was a male dismayed while sinning,
A jaded sailor in the Sea of Women;
And yet this waif, this floral sprite,
Made me stammer with burnished fright.