Ubi Sunt

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2005 by Leader, Mary

Chance led me that morning to a secluded gallery.

Certainly I was glad to be dead. It explained a lot.

And it allowed me to harangue every daub. You there. :

You're too intense. Hey you, you're too prolonged.

You. Yeah, you. You're too alone. What's your rush?

Probably they did not deserve all this crit. No color ever

Manufactured would do for meaninglessness. Well.

I have my own table. My own table and nothing

To say or eat. Pretty river. Lists. In the end it was all of it.

A little girl weeping without a plan, gone on the train

With her grandparents, her mother impossibly near

On the other side of the glass oblong. Resemblance

Clear. Lost now to me month after

Month after tree upon tree upon bridge after tree

After month upon bridge after day then several bridges

Close together, as over the Arne enmapped, too small to

Take, as in Take the Queensborough Bridge. At any rate .

I'd rather look at something tired. This bonnet is old.

This lady was skating. Did this boy rise to a Cardinalate?

Dunno. This fly has a cherry; this fly had a cherry; this

Fly has a cherry. Today a white truck replaces a yellow car.

Tomorrow a void, utterly unpainful, will replace my face.

Yesterday a white dress replaced a yellow skull. I can't help

It if God, a realist if not exactly a representationalist, had or

Has only black or gray or any color preceded by blackish

For holes. Even dead, I try to defend myself with a smirk.

Grandfather-aged fathers are nothing new. Gerhard Richter.

Abraham. Norman Mailer. Or visit any cemetery:

To be sure there's a man named Josiah or somesuch

Alongside his three wives in a row. "Child of his old age."

Their child is named after the town where she

Went to college, or "attended," as he would say.

You'd have thought speaking the same language

Would have been enough. Instead it was merely almost

All that mattered. Was this time a city or a countryside?

Let's see: Were there planes or geese? What were we nearing?

What three parts has a leaf? Because of a snapshot,

Because of a set of parents, I know a dress of dotted swiss.

White dots upon fabric of navy blue. Little boats, yes?

More like waves, no? More like umlauts. No. I am not that

Locatable and Rembrandt probably never heard of

Dotted swiss if indeed such even existed then and who

Cares anyway what tense we're in and my brown velvet gown

May cover me over sans marker and it shall not obtain

To anyone else's job to drink my sweet wine, Greensleeves.