But To Discover Same ("The only way two people can make it work") A POEM

Worse and more embarrassing mistakes have been made. I've heard, for instance, that Ashbery included the same poem in two collections. Gasp? Not really. It's impossible to keep up with all our poem titles--which change organically and otherwise.  In my case, I realized last week I'd submitted "But To Discover Same" to several journals, when, in fact, the poem is in my online, pdf chapbook, I Feel Good (Beard of Bees, 2013). So I had to withdraw it.

The most splendid news is I loved writing this poem. A few years ago I'd was in communication with a one-time, or not, junky whose level of abstention from booze or heroin was unclear. He wrote, read, thought.

So that's the "skin pop of retribution." As for Buffalo Springfield, didn't you, don't you love them? And imagine yourself, in a not entirely related retrospection, on a crowded bus with jovial folk carrying chickens in wire cages. But not all the folk are jovial. And how do we make anything work, anything, let alone, it.

But To Discover Same

The only way two people can
make it work (advise close
consideration of  “work”
“make” “it” and seven other
napkin holders) is

to inhabit a fearful present
beautiful
in its summation of
so times kicking
screaming (being how) thusly
one ends up an ivory
engraved and pouchy corpus

by which it is meant
not only to have now but
now be all and each
skin pop of retribution

and restart natural impulse aborted
when Babar & co.
were stole by lesser than gods

to neither pretend

Buffalo Springfield is
on the turntable nor
that even are “make” “it”
or “work” feasible

and so to arrive at the depot
after sitting in
a car chicken-shit
packed (also feathers, old babies
venomous grandparents)

to expect no one to know
you are a soft kiss on
the sky at dawn but

to discover, same.

_____

Sarah Sarai, from I Feel Good (Beard of Bees, 2013).