Contemplate This

 

Abstract Meadow 21 x 29.7 pastel on paper c/o Karin Goeppert

CONTEMPLATE THIS

I’m trying to be a better person.

I really want to improve.

I usually only eat meat that’s been

coddled from “stable to table.”

I renounce violence at least

three times a week. Still,

I almost regret not deconstructing

my wife’s first boyfriend’s distinctly sagging

inexplicably self-satisfied face

when he dropped by for dinner

during the Great Heat Wave of 2011—

deconstruction, yeah, that’s it, between dessert

and a lovely espresso with a splash of grappa in

it would have literally hit the spot.

Therapeutically minded

I contemplate various forms

of domestic plant life. The slightly

nodding fronds are reassuringly mute

yet an orchid’s pale creamy petals

as pale and creamy as sauce

over one of those pigs, roasted now,

who, if you believe the PR department

died happy—and over Swabian pasta—

make me think of W. eating and talking

talking and eating

and all I want to do

is disable his point of view.

The world is made of ten-thousand opinions.

Whose logic isn’t exhausting? At the same time

the trees are ecstatic with birds, their

give-and-take mercifully indecipherable.

Swirling flocks of swallows

soaring and dipping in Cairo

doing somersaults in Athens, in Berlin

and there I go again—just can’t stop dropping those names.