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Between green wall and greening chairs:
quite like still life, at first, like the leitmotiv
of the dying who begin to sputter their last
words. The incessant spew: someone says
Piaget reveals that Babies are stupid,
another one whispers that transcendentalists
engaged in free love in a commune in Vermont.
Oh the sexual Innuendos in Walden Pond. Everyone
here avoids talk of real children—instead Antebellum
becomes the great dame of Reconstruction whose
particular affair with Ulysses S. Grant—or maybe,
Lee—is a Southern folk tale. Oh, sex and silverware.
Where was that? Edgar Allen Poe was the Belle
of the Ball? Emerson died in a ditch with a mouth
full of laudanum—pity the poor dragon-chasers.
Emperor Norton appointed a successor in D.C.
Then a student pops in—it's frozen silence.
Is that the language trips into
boring: piston, throb, pulse,
surrender, and unintended
metaphor of engine with
a nicked timing belt. Intimacy
hangs like a negligee, which
is, of course, a sign that
intimacy is a dilettante:
breathless and worn
like a flounder on a hook.
If there were a dictionary
of desire, it would consist
largely of drowning motions:
the flailing of an arm,
the slow collapse of lungs,
the suspension between
a gasp and a gulp.
A former professor leans
over a birch table
and says
you are turning
from mystery
to obscurity.
I respond:
Mystery: the sperm whales
floating gaudily down
Euclid Avenue.
Obscurity: the rose
growing from film canister
in a vastness
of Death Valley.
Mystery: The Empress
of Orchids walking
amongst river
dolphins.
Obscurity: Chairman
Mao's army of paper
tigers looming
in the back of
the man.
I sip coffee, and, like
a propaganda poster,
I smile.
Derick sincerely believes that everyone needs to dance around their house naked at least once a week; in addition to that, being declared an ethicist has made him a general misanthrope. Most good ethicists are. He loves tomatoes and thinks that loving such fruit is profound. He does not like to speak in third-person because he understands that it is a sign of true insanity, but so is literature. He has vowed no longer to be witty in biographies that are included in literary journals of any medium.