Look askance, all you
want, at a people who
draped their cats as
queens, in gold and lapis
and jasper and jade,
or shaved their eyebrows
in lamenting grief when
their whiskered royals
sauntered through Duat to
bask beneath Ra’s passing,
but have you, a lap
among a sea of laps, ever
been so richly blessed by
an ambivalent god brushing
against your shins?
Billy Collins doesn’t
have a Twitter account so
you’ll have to follow him
more craftily. Not
in his footsteps, but
slightly to the right or
farly to the left, or
with binoculars as he
serpentines through an alpine
pass, hoping you never find
the map he left crumpled
beneath the coffee grounds.
In 1980 the Yomiuri Giants
signed outfielder Gary Thomasson
for 1.2 million dollars
which he used to birth
a metaphor by sitting
on the bench, hitlessly waving
his bat and spinning,
they said, like
a Giant Human Fan.
And so ‘Thomasson’ came to
represent a contradictory remnant
within our built environment.
Once usefully functional,
now functionally useless,
yet conspicuously maintained.
A doorknob in a wall;
a bridge connecting two halves of air;
a spiral staircase, leading
I don’t know how much God
spent building me, and I could
probably figure the maintenance
from gas bills and groceries
and Netflix subscriptions but
I know the cost to save me
so I so often pray that I am
more than a doorless balcony and
that he would, once, tell me
where my stairs
His single sheet
of lined paper
was aligned with his
single pencil
which rested atop
his single table which
wobbled next to mine.
And though his hands
were folded, waiting,
and though his eyes
were fixed, unwavering,
into space, I think
I was more expectant.