...

When it Seems Like a Good Idea, Remember

I.  The couple next door
(you remember—middle aged and thickset?
He's in engineering and she's in pursuit of Self)
installed a bird feeder on the thunderstuck maple.  Pastoral
in theory, countrified turned to horrified
with the arrival of starlings, ravens, and jays.  Birds of War.
Feathers are never tranquil when blood speckled;
the silly thing came down faster than it went up.

II.  I am neither light
nor energy.
I am not the cure for what ails you.

The threat of a spousal clutch
can only lead to bag packing, ill will,
and bloody feathers.  Humor me—
equate that constricting emotion with a condemned man's
first glimpse of the white sheeted gurney.
Too theatrical?  Then I'll give you a fat girl's panic
when she realizes she's forgotten her physician's excuse note
two minutes before Phys Ed class.
Or the salesman, who, terrified of cold-calling, phones in sick
on Call-a-Client Tuesday.
Neither scenario as dramatic as the condemned man, but
do you see?  Idyllic
in theory
only,

for I know who I am.

Not light, not energy,
and not
the cure for what ails you.

III.  I've read them all, Dorcas.  His "Complete Works."  I waded methodically through the schoolboy essays, the poems of bloodshed, the verses of love and lust.  I read the letters To and From; I devoured the meaty court transcripts.  To presume his chilhood worse than any other is delusional—Vitalie was less Monster than Mother.  What a goddamned shame that Paul, on that fateful Thursday in Brussels, aimed the gun too low—the Bridegroom's devotees would have had him canonized; oh, how that would have made him laugh!  As for me, I remain underwhelmed.

" ... my wisdom is as much ignored as chaos. / What is my nonbeing, compared with the stupor which awaits you?"  — Arthur Rimbaud

© 2005