Weekly Poem: 'These Arms of Mine'

**By David Kirby**          Sometimes interviewers want to know what dead people I'd like to have dinner with,                   but my answer to that is nobody. I mean, I wouldn't mind following Dante around          and see who he talks to and where he shops and what          his writing schedule is, but can you imagine trying to have a conversation with Dante?                   Yeah, he wrote the greatest poem ever, but his world view would be totally different from mine,          plus his temper was supposed to have been terrible.          Shakespeare wouldn't say anything, probably; he'd be storing up bits for his next play. Whitman                   would probably talk your head off, and then you'd be bored and not like his work as much as you          used to. No, I don't want to have dinner anybody.          But if you're serious about time travel, I'd like to go to Jamaica in 1967 and be sitting at a table                   and drinking a Red Stripe in the after-hours club where Bob Marley is playing, and Otis Redding,          who is touring the island, comes in "like a god,"          according to eyewitness accounts, and Bob Marley looks up and begins to sing "These Arms of Mine."                   Wow. I tell you, I wouldn't be myself. I'd be Tolius or Tristan or Lancelot,          crying my eyes out for Cressida or Isolde          or Guinevere. She'd be on the battlements of a castle in Troy or Wales or England,                   all beautiful and sad-eyed, and I'd be clanking up a storm as I drop my lance and brush          back my visor and pound the table with my mailed fist          while all the rastas look at me and say, "I and I a-go cool out wit' a spliff, mon!" But my arms                   are burning, burning from wanting you and wanting, wanting to hold you because          I need me somebody, somebody to treat me right,          oh, I need your woman's loving arms to hold me tight. And I . . . I . . . I need . . . I need your . . . I need                   your tender lips, and if you would let these arms, if you would let these arms of mine, oh, if you would          just let them hold you, oh, how grateful I would be.   "David Kirby":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/david-kirby is the author of several books of criticism, essays, children's literature and poetry, including most recently, "Talking about Movies with Jesus" (2011) and "The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems" (2007), a finalist for the National Book Award. Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University.