New poem

ANOTHER FAILED POEM ABOUT STAPLINGS

               after Sandra Beasley

Maybe it was starlings, and maybe my stunted brain

took in the evident world and the written word

with its usual clubfoot alacrity. It probably was

about those, ah, little birds, famous for

showing up in poems but I was too taken with

my own dumb misprision to get it right.

Think about it: there was a secret

world in which a lot of people, for a long time,

had been writing about multiple fastenings

of disparate paper with bits of post-consumer steel.

I thought of John Keats: all week long

I've struggled in my heart to not be terrorized

by his bloody death, his lungs coming up into his mouth

in unsettling wads. I tried to remember

whether he had ever written about those birds

but I couldn't find his book

and it didn't matter, anyway,

dead as he was and wrong as I was about

that other imagined, weird poem

which announced itself a member

of the violently specific canon regarding office supplies.

Or maybe it was about the awful,

mechanical closings of some surgical incisions

I witnessed when I was a kid,

when I stared, too long, at the zippered wounds

of men whose necks were no

stronger than mine, who I might soon become,

I thought, if nothing went right.

And then nothing did

and whatever was explained to me,

the expectations of textbook procedure and the pain of the actual,

I got that wrong, too, surprise,

let us not be shocked by this apology to the gathered sky.