(a cento)
The problem of psychologically distorted deities is an extremely complex subject, which transcends the limitations of the present work. In the east, I could see Jupiter rising, fat and blurry. We begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled. The riotous glass houses built on rock. If you could hear the glaring lightbulb sing. I too have loved—an incumbent husband all wives can imagine dead. Night executions spare me the agony of early rising. Last year our drunken quarrels had no explanations. The old follies never return—the houses still burn. A gentleman is an aristocrat on bail. Let’s face it, English is a racist last-ditch. The paint is always peeling from the palace. The firemen smash holes in their own house. The great boredom blazing on sterile water. The way a pain begins. Yet one deadbeat can pollute a whole universe. I can’t explain it, but perhaps it means that once you’re over fifty you’re rid of a lot of decibels. The boats have rolled up their colored sails. Weather drips quietly through the skeins of my diary. The president always knew, under her lilacs was a liver fading. Abruptly the season backed up. Bright green out of the red. Almost fell off my empire. But people do change in life, as well in fiction. It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension to life, when life is precisely that dimension. Like a summer kangaroo, each of us is a part of the sun in its tumbling commotion. The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely these feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Suppose this poem were about you–would you put in the things I’ve carefully left out: descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily people behave toward each other? No two poets ever agreed on anything, and that amused us. It seemed good, the clotted darkness that came every day. You wore your cummerbund with the stars and stripes. I, kilt in lime, held a stethoscope to the head of the parting guest. Together we were a couple forever.
~
Gary Percesepe is the author of THE WINTER OF J, and an Associate Editor at New World Writing.