Honeymoon's over

FACEDOWN BLUES

I’m in love w/ a girl I watched eat an apple core.
Her best pet name for me was “Little Fiddlehead.”
She was the type to play games: reindeer, newlywed,
card & board. She drove a coach & four. In Baltimore
she blew me fourteen kisses, each a pouty semaphore,
unflagging. A locomotive wept in the engine shed,
each night for two weeks. I slept the sleep of a riverbed,
woke up water-logged down by the old New Jersey shore,
alone. She couldn’t take it anymore: I was a ball & chain,
or so she said. She wouldn’t take it back. A heart attack,
Jack--mending under an unfixed leak, a chance of rain,
a chance of pain: a sweet hard smack like sugar cane,
an ache like a cavity down in my soul. My gunnysack
has no counter-attack. Lightning struck my weathervane.