in which David Lehman imagines he channels D.H. Lawrence and approximates S. Dobyns

When she says Margarita she means Daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means mercurial.
And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"
she means, "Put your arms around me from behind
as I stand disconsolate at the window."

He's supposed to know that.

When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in Virginia
or he is in Boston, writing, and she is in New York, reading,
or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he
is raking leaves in Ithaca
or he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolate
at the window overlooking the bay
where a regatta of many-colored sails is going on
while he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

The rest of the poem reads the same way. It isn't bad. He's got a good prose rhythm and a comfortable relationship with the language; the same storyteller pace, the familiar structure of image-location-action-dialogue-vernacular-small profundity in declarative sentences all the way down. A break from the ecstatic. Still, I have my own stories: these days I'd rather sit with Robert and watch the the ripples subside.