And This Unconventional Angel That is Mine. And the World
For Real
by Michael Blumenthal
Let me say at the very outset that it does not surprise me
that not all I have uttered to the hapless air has been returned
to me in kind, or that I am now sitting here, wound up
like a Russian doll with polemics and ideologies and the duff
and detritus of too many promises, let me say that I am tired
of the ineffectual ointments of the everyday, that the grass
has now been cut, the hedges trimmed, the children awakened
by the mower’s hum, and last night’s bee sting has blown up
into a conspicuous bruise, a blemish not even a make-up artist
could disguise, this is nature’s way says my wife, who should know,
being a child of the natural, and my sister-in-law is screaming
at the children about too much computer time, the air is rife with
the scent of summer, flush and turgid with green, the forecast
is for thundershowers, a wind from the west, all to be followed
by birds, and the ratcheting harvest. And the night, then, for real.
Copyright © 2008 by Michael Blumenthal.
This poem is part of AND, poems by Michael Blumenthal, to appear with BOA Editions in 2009.