|
"Smiles"
It was as if a pterodactyl had landed, cocky,
and fabulous amid the earthbound,
so it's not difficult to understand why I smiled
when I saw that Rolls Royce
moving slowly on the Black Horse Pike
past the spot where Crazy Eddie’s once was.
Just one week earlier I'd seen a man,
buttoned-down and wing-tipped,
reading Sonnets to Orpheus in paperback
at the mall's orange julius stand.
My smile was inward, I craved some small intimacy,
not with him, but with an equal lover of the discordant,
another purchaser adrift among the goods.
Sometimes I'd rather be ankle-deep in mud puddles,
swatting flies with the Holstein's,
I'd rather be related to that punky boy with purple hair
walking toward the antique shop
than to talk with someone who doesn’t know
he lives "In Siécle de Kafka," as the French
dubbed it in 1984. The State of New Jersey that same year,
refused to pay Ai for a poetry reading,
because her name needed two more letters,
which produced my crazy smile,
though I wanted to howl, too, I wanted to meet
the man who made the rule, kiss him hard
on his bureacratic lips, perhaps cook him a scalding bowl
of alphabet soup. Instead we added two asterisks
and the check came! Four spaces on a form all filled in
and the State was pleased, which is why
I'm lonely for the messiness of the erotic, lonely
for that seminal darkness that lurks at birthday parties,
is hidden among hugs at weddings, out of which
smiles, even if wry or bitter, are born. In the newspaper today,
it says that the man who robbed a jewelry store
in Pleasantville, crippling the owner, wasn’t happy
with his life, was just trying to be happier.
And in Cardiff, just down the road, someone will die at the traffic circle,
because history says so, history says soon,
and that's the circle I must take, in my crushable Toyota,
if I wish to stay on the Black Horse Pike,
and I do.
—Stephen Dunn
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
