In the Meatpacking District
The day like a thousand steps
and me too anticipation-petrified
to note the strain of each or all;
Imagining you beside me at MoMA
in the next room contemplative
before Magritte while I succumb
to Klee's underembellished portrait
and discover Boccioni for the first time;
Wishing you there beside me
to mark with a knowing glance
the humor of a tourist confident to his friend
that The Persistence of Memory
is Dali's most famous painting
(and promising the existence
of a larger version elsewhere).
At dinner you hide in the shrugs
of friends sick of hearing your name
cross my lips like a profane sacrament.
Later, across a table your angular visage --
overbite inhabiting a cloudy smile --
captures candleflame and dances,
a vindication of our mutual apprehension
three years later -- and not a blue day gone by
without a rumor of rain in your name.
To have given what cannot be reclaimed,
a cloak sewn from what is worthy in me
that i'd forgotten lending.
My spectral companion embodied
and in the flicker and din,
a drag queen belting out show tunes
at the next bar
over cabernet
no candle.
and me too anticipation-petrified
to note the strain of each or all;
Imagining you beside me at MoMA
in the next room contemplative
before Magritte while I succumb
to Klee's underembellished portrait
and discover Boccioni for the first time;
Wishing you there beside me
to mark with a knowing glance
the humor of a tourist confident to his friend
that The Persistence of Memory
is Dali's most famous painting
(and promising the existence
of a larger version elsewhere).
At dinner you hide in the shrugs
of friends sick of hearing your name
cross my lips like a profane sacrament.
Later, across a table your angular visage --
overbite inhabiting a cloudy smile --
captures candleflame and dances,
a vindication of our mutual apprehension
three years later -- and not a blue day gone by
without a rumor of rain in your name.
To have given what cannot be reclaimed,
a cloak sewn from what is worthy in me
that i'd forgotten lending.
My spectral companion embodied
and in the flicker and din,
a drag queen belting out show tunes
at the next bar
over cabernet
no candle.
posted by Moon | 11/28/2006 08:06:00 PM
4 Comments:
Enjoyed it quite a bit.
In my opinion your poetry is of far better quality compared to the average internet poems. Of course I am no expert. Have you ever sent anything to magazines?
Thanks, May. Once in a while I think about trying to publish one or another of my poems. I don't think anything here is of that quality, or at least at a level I'd be comfortable submitting, but a few might be brought up to a level with more pointed revision (pretty much everything here was written pretty quickly and only modestly revised).
The main thing for now is that whatever I post here I can't seek to publish, because most poetry journals are online and google would make it possible to glean my real-world identity. When I'm free to acknowledge this weblog, or when I take it down entirely (something that will probably happen at some point, but not very soon), then I might reconsider whether any of these are worth additional work.
Thanks for the kind words.
I wanted you to know, for whatever it may be worth, that I keep coming back to this poem.
Thank you, Abhayah. There really is no higher compliment to offer a poem. It means a lot. If only the poem's subject, who has read it and seems to approve at least a little, were similarly inclined . . . . But then that I'm offering it in verse says plenty about the likelihood of that. :-)
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