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After Di Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet
First, you notice the torso, archaic but not Apollo’s by a long shot. It has breasts, and callipygian hips, but isn’t exactly Venus, either. The head’s fallen off and the arms, blunt stumps, point mute questions. The legs halt just below the buttocks. A bunch of bananas blooms before the crotch, connected by a dark strip I want to say is shadow, but. . . Tarantula? Bloodstain? I can’t see the front lower torso, or privates of any sort, and look again at the bananas. The black banana-stem? Naw. Too obvious. I resist waxing Freudian since it’s 1917 and “Yes, We Have No Bananas” is yet to become every immigrant grocer’s nightmare.
Stage right, a green coliseum arches. In the distance, a train rushes past, all a-steam. Factory smokestack. Ship’s mast. Not a single gun. Not even a fire. It’s 1917 and war ravages Europe, blotted to a green sludge. Sun? Moon? No light-source to be seen. Nothing but bananas, bananas, we certainly have bananas, and this torso— twisted relic—truncated and the brightest thing around.
o0o o0o o0o o0o o0o o0o o0o o0o
Revival
Some lines seem destined for the nearest landfill —the way my name, when I type the wrong keys, becomes “Ant.” I feel like an ant these days, lugging my giant crumb to some great sand-hill, dumping it, and trudging off for more. I wonder where my good old-fashioned brain went? It didn’t fit my head, like the attachment I bought second-hand for my vacuum cleaner.
You can’t do much good with a bad connection— part A fits into part B, no exceptions, or you’re screwed. There’s no great adapter to plug into, turn on the juice, the power and the glory. Forever and ever, we survive, trying dead sockets till something sparks alive.
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