Couplets from the Second Floor

Posted on 05 February 2010

Neighbors moan below
While I pound Jaeger bombs

And stupor at syndicated television—
Lieutenant, this corpse will not stop burning.*

In such times of idleness,
I am surprised by my reflection,

Expecting instead to see a giant
cartoon boob or some post-modernist

rendering of labia, but other parts are still
here: skin old enough to be an eighty-

foot tree, senses opaque as brick,
A body aged by rapture.

note: The asterisked (*) line is taken from the Galway Kinnell poem “The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible”. I love his reading of the poem, which is included in Caedmon’s audio anthology of poets reading their own work.