Expect Such Breathlessness

The Nearest Simile Is Respiration
To poetry

I was boozed I was doped I was maybe
a floozy before you knew me, loose
leafed like autumn and most of the books
of the Old Testament that fell out
of my father's Bible. I had a body.

I had a habit of hauling my telescope
into the outskirts, ransacking all
the toothsome blackness for what: a reason
not to do me in. Proof I was more
than the seasonal ragbag detritus
choking the rooftop gutters, more
than a piece of the cosmic dust
in some ruined philosophy.

I could not be consoled by the universal
Sisyphus in us all, the dung beetle
nuzzling its putrid globe.

I could not hitch my wagon. The stars
and stars abrade my notions of my Self;
tricuspid Eros chewed me raw; Jesus
Christ rubbed mud in my eyes, and I saw
not. I did not see.

But with you! my sweetheart hairshirt,
my syntactic gondolier, ruffian for hire, befoolable
irresolute Chanticleer: with you, I back-float
the massy and heretofore unnavigable childhood
algal blooms, where no fish swam. No fish
have swum that Mississippi.

With you, I forgive my father's notes
to NASA, the self-inflicted swastika tattoo,
my sister's coked-up juggernaut cannonball
into the afterlife.

I forgive the afterlife,
resurrect John Lennon and the jukebox
at the Quik 'N' Hot, infect myself
with a rare strain of tarantism. With you, I dance
the summum bonum. With you, I am greater
than or equal to the lack, and luck is weather
that permits my red begonias.

Ashley Capps
Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields
The University of Akron

(I just bought this book and it waits like a pastry for me to be allowed to read anything not on my exams list. You have no excuse not to indulge.)