Title this one “Ode on a Broken Arm.”
There is a mildly humorous pun on “humerus”, and there is a kind of odd
mock-romantic tone, addressed to the speaker’s body, with images of an orange
moon glistening on a placid sea, and this final stanza:
O prostrate body, busy with your
break,
false tissue forming, striving to
recover,
when will you make do like the
moon
cold on a placid sea, with three
limbs, take
the other for a cruise, like an
elderly lover
not expecting much.
Right at the end a pronouncement
on aging arrives. The broken limb, like an elderly lover, doesn’t have much vigor
to offer, but love entails more than sex. Patience and a gentle care define the
mood. The poem is okay. I kind of like it. I don’t have much more to say about
it.
An image arrived out of nowhere
yesterday which has been rattling around the vacant boxcar of my empty head, so
let’s play in the aura of today’s ersatz romance and see what comes of that:
Blue
Foxtrot with My Orangutan Love
How her silver dress shimmers!
Her bare hairy feet, those
opposable
Toes with strong yellow nails
Grip the dance floor.
My wan legs shuffle, stiff
As brass-tipped canes
My weak arms search for her waist
The blocks of my dense feet
Struggle to follow my lady’s
gorgeous
Simian rhythm, curving
Like the fronds of a tree fern
Through the music’s crowded
Melancholy. Her little round head
The narrow, soulful eyes
Like rich brown nuts
That gaze into mine teach
Me the deep, tasteful pleasures
Of figs and intricate branchways
Swinging through the warmth
Of her dark, soft forest
In the loving flow
Of a tropical rain.
So arrives the one moment
I have ever, from my sad
humanity, danced.
Desperately I ape the graceful
Nature of her slow, lithe steps
Her long orange hand
Rests like a birdwing
Butterfly on my shoulder,
And her other, cradled
Like a python around mine
Crushes my phalanges
In the ravish of her hold
My scapula cracks,
The clavicle, with a soft
Pop beneath my soft flesh,
Fractures, and if there is pain
I will not feel it
Through the mists of blue music
And my grave devotion
Foxtrotting with my orangutan
love.
KZ
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