Bruce Smith
Delirium [2]: I shiver until I’m under the sand at the bottom of the ocean. I’m in
the Howness not the Whatness where I taste the tense and wait for you
in your disparity, who cannot be sensed through my gills, cannot be clasped
or jawed. I’ve got eyes that can’t matter. Jelly is not a witness or strictly
a thing. And the territory is not your moony seas, said Elizabeth Bishop to me.
Everybody was wrong [although nobody is wrong], even Dickinson in her room
writing down her wrongnesses, her abdication [of me], her [in] justices, her [self]
punishments then sewing them and hiding them under the bed [so wrong]. Wrongness
has a voice [nobody’s voice] but wrongness has no audience [everybody’s devoted deafness].
I’m speaking for nobody when I say love and language kept her [me] alive and in error.
The children want the eccentric genius [in the book] to be good, not a selfish prick
who happens to be a woman, a narcissistic, watery echo of themselves, real and wishful
in the way the children think of real: seldom, LCD instant jolt of never and dim
yet waiting in a windy uplift for an audience [just one] yet needing no audience.
The children want good or bad, but good [selfishly], no wobbling, no wind over water.
The book of poems by award-winning X or a glazed magazine? I glaze and breeze
through, float in to find cleavage or a length of leg arched by a red bustier or a glossy shame
article, a smut article about money and its trickle down to not me, Señor,
and yet the currents fill that part of me [that part of you] with rage, like a lock
until the water’s even with the other part of me [you] and so the sleek vessel sails on.