A faint smell of urine
embroidering that bouquet of mold the big cushions
give off days the fog won’t lift,
and a shelf of bone
growing out over the eyelids like evening’s shadow
across a field of corn—
The whole parade
leaking out from your shoulders, bequeathing
to the groin a pang of distance;
then that metallic taste in the mouth
and a voice you had let yourself believe
was dead
close now by your ear, intimate and sweet:
Well, well, well,
look what we have here.
August Kleinzahler, “Disappointment” from Live from the Hong Kong Club: Poems, 1975-1990. Copyright © 2000 by August Kleinzahler. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.
Source: Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000)
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