Misdirection: A Poem
       

I.

A genius said that without God, people would believe
in just about anything. But wasn't God already almost anything?

If I'd gotten up earlier, the awful roar of the leaf blower
in the rented yard wouldn't have jolted me awake.

Imagine how some fowl or Dickinson might have felt, or someone
even more birdlike. (Whoever came down the walk has flown.)

II.

It feels safer in the city, in the improbable center of a vaulted
restaurant, all the feathery flames shaking dimly, the clatter

of cutlery, din of benign indifference. The knives face
inward; otherwise I'd be threatening my neighbor, not just

myself. When they served the bird, the skin was badly charred.
Being an artist is different from just being:

III.

If poetry made people happy, then my mentors
would be happy—at least for having written alive lines suitable

for their eulogies. Even a novelist knows there's no cure for death
in Venice. Though that's a work of fiction, it inspired this real thought:

In order to express appreciation for the outside world,
you have to lock yourself in. That philosophy got

IV.

Mann's protagonist into youth-obsessed trouble, but it provided material
for the author. Do we appreciate the actual people who have paid

that price so that other's can benefit? Most poetry is at best
the province of such unprofitable questions, or something

even bleaker. I've often thought that writing poems could be a way
of imposing one's inexplicable misery on others. It's possible

V.

to delight in that kind of misery? You can put a happy spin on what
I'm saying, but finding the words would take labor and patience,

and degrees are expensive. They don't even qualify you
to keep writing. For instance, you can't just back out by making

some fluttery case that people wouldn't read what they didn't
enjoy. Actions and attitudes are not the same thing.

VI.

Before the leaf blower woke me, I was on a roof under
some kind of pecked-up clot-job overhead; it was blocking

the Grand Canal. From the top of my palatial prison, I could see
past the Mediterranean. Hard to say if the flood was there unjustly,

or if it was I who had done something terribly wrong.
Even as I awoke, the tide fled with the sweeping shadow of a seagull

slashing the yard and vanishing over the trellis. It was late
summer and lots of birds were agitated. I thought I remembered

a choleric bard describing a crow as a vessel of depth that keeps
filling with vinegar and toxic purple oil. I thought

I could wind up with some overblown statement about God.
You come to that point in life where everything points

VII.

somewhere else.

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Copyright © 2019 Stephen Massimilla All rights reserved
from Prism Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission