Perspective
after Feeding the Turtle, Eric Fischl, 2016
In the bedroom, the man disentangles his limbs from those of another.
The backyard’s voices are breezes in the canopies of cicadas and birds,
held so faintly aloft they reach his ears only by chance, their trips so disastered
they cannibalize one another, and only the whirrs of cicadas remain like a
motor kept on. Then: Leave me alone! Then: I told you! How is it he came
to be able to see, in this room, the surface of the pool’s crimped cellophane,
light barreling across it to the diving board, the green in the white of its gleam
and, above it, pale stippling an indifferent sky under which a boy leans
on his mother, both unaware of the crash coming toward them, in Bangkok, or Leeds?
Chosen by the Lion
for Linda Gregg
Back in our day, the men who were men were men,
and there’s the rub.
We gauged everything by their desire.
Cynthia sits, swinging her legs over the rapids
with a bag full of oranges on the bridge.
A cloud, shifting, lights a blazing
and, behind her, the forest of cicadas.
The dot on the high ridge above her
moves until it is a truck
and the sun flashes its windshield
like Leda’s wing jutting from the foam.
Want was the ground we walked on, even
– and especially – not knowing it.
The romance of self then so easily overtook us.
Cynthia leans out, spits, and hurls the rind to the water
like a southpaw.
The truck has disappeared.
There are those who feel ecstasy when a man enters them,
those who feel joy,
and all know the stone of all right.
I know ecstasy, you said.
Back then, you raked your hair like a woman chosen.
You were the drama, I the unforgiving.
Over dinner we talked about poems and men.
