Midway 5

The glass was a smeary mosaic of squiggles, signs
of invention and accident, the willed finger
and bead-trail, volitional or determined lines
criss-crossing a palimpsest. Older he stood longer
until the face that ogled him from the mist
was nearly unrecognizeable, a white-bristled
mistrusted uncle, and thoughts of romance fizzled.
At times like those reality was best,
the close four walls, a skull divested of visions
of Celias and Lucastas and Corinnas,
rain-stippled breasts, inviolate vaginas;
but still the hand, slave to the body's passions,
described outrageous curves in watery scratch
that nothing in the shape of words could catch.

3/09

Midway 4

There was always a figure that leered over his head
and down his writing arm, and he like St. Matthew
struck crooked with fear and boylike, and it said
put this in but the lines were rank with mildew,
so he thought of flowers with their obnoxious odors,
the slough of nature and the fishy stink
of recognitions in the silted waters,
eyes that gazed off sidelong toward the brink
of nothing, past the gray of the portrait's edge
where God and His angels hid among the ghosts
of the merely dead; but still the empty page
boomed louder than the attic, the keening gusts
against the windows: bland electric field
where feeble invention quit and vision failed.

3/5/09