POETRY BY THOM WARD
AFTER DECADES OF SILENCE, TOILET SPEAKS
Last things first.
In regard to the great
nocturnal-diurnal conflict
prompting all that disaffection,
resentment and grief, you must understand -
I don't care if the seat is up or down.
And though you've brought many parts of yourself,
not once have you brought a gift, ribbons and bow,
some small token of thanks
for each brilliant thought you've hatched
while resting much flesh on my porcelain
which is not a hole in the ground.
It's one of the responsibilities of art
to provide others with more intelligent
questions, the flash of synchronic time.
I have no such charge, yet
when you need me, really need me,
even more than love's orifice,
there's nothing else you desire.
Look how the planets and satellites float
in the night's black bowl. Does it startle you
that I can be romantic? Whatever the occasion,
some people love to booze and schmooze.
Some don't. But everyone visits me,
even those who bluster cheap euphemisms,
though, in truth, I exceed metaphor.
Toilet is toilet as death is death,
so many parts of yourself
whooshed away. I know you mostly avoid
ambivalence and solitude, won't admit
you're still perplexed by how the flapper
and lift chain work. Have another drink,
another snack. You can't stop philosophy
from conceding metaphysics to science -
splash, splash, flush - the universe expands,
brain cells burn while something like the truth
plays hide-and-go-seek. I'm here. Always here.
My perfect ellipse stays put.
* * *
POOF
So what if her sex life was a slow train
that only stopped in dilapidated towns.
By removing the variable of expectation
she still managed a formula in the neighborhood
of science. Perhaps beef stroganoff
was the highest art, and guys lacking
status or wealth made an effort to acknowledge
overt deficiencies, fell toward little fibs
rather than big lies, the syntax of their affection
a dangling participle. It seemed that every wife
who suddenly chose to drip across the deck
of some playboy's yacht, bikini and coconut oil,
was diluted by insolence, the bogus rush
of diving into the shallow end.
How else to explain Veronica? - her steamy fling
with the venture capitalist from Amherst,
cut short by a road sign gusting
through the Ferarri's glass, only hours
after administering (what her sated friend called)
masterful cunnilingus. He died under the weight
of: Entering Lowell. The absence of evidence
no proof of the evidence of absence, nor help
to a woman, this same friend, on the phone,
her anguish accelerating into denial and rage,
all those demonstrative junctures,
as she played confidant and shrink, recalling
the other gift of memory is to forget,
how the boots of anxiety and doubt
walk us toward a place where even the reverse
has a reverse. And when Veronica
had loosed everything that needed expulsion,
the episode finished or suspended, the cradle
again found its receiver, the comforting click
of yin and yang, she returned
to slicing mushrooms, thinking about Ralph,
how he slept by the fridge, a lump of reticent
fur, how cats, even the males, understood
the perpetual delight found in the aloof,
while we humans throw punches at the cosmos,
a magnificent fuss, liposuction and dental work,
hoopla, flimflam, scuttlebutt, exhausted by our own
verbosity, and then one day poof! -
we're gone. If those are the stakes, she thought,
why not grant each other the illusion of value
like surgeons introducing themselves at cocktail parties,
or get the occasional hump from a tone-deaf
bassoonist, a corpulent jock. As long as a few
creative ideas refused to atrophy
among the dreck, and that they recognize
the potential of homemade stroganoff, she'd entertain,
at least for the rest of this month,
whoever stumbled in, bad ties, bad breath,
the most gloriously useless and beautiful men.
Thom
Ward is Editor/Development Director for
BOA Editions, Ltd. His
poetry collection, Small Boat With Oars of Different Size,
was published
in 1999 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Ward's poetry chapbook,
Tumblekid, the winner of the 1998 Devil's Millhopper Poetry
Contest, was
published in 2000 by the University South Carolina-Aiken. He lives
with
his wife, three children, two cottonwood trees, two dogs, a cat and
a
fish in Palmyra, New York.
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