I
Last night, meaning to speak of chicken soup,
I spoke instead of soup of dust, which might
have been profound but wasn’t. Here I become
absurd, an embarrassment—too tall, too pink,
missing the jokes, getting the sexes wrong.
The customs police found my cache of words
and confiscated it; I took a deep breath
at the border, blew it out, and was no one,
a foreign body with a limp. And yet
I keep returning. There’s something to it,
this emptiness-as idiots push with a vague
grin through the swinging doors of heaven.
II
A man bewitched into a frog, admiring
the calves of passing ladies, can only croak
or hop ridiculously after them.
And yet his thin legs dangle and stretch
voluptuously in the algae, his mouth
relaxes into speechless green. His ear,
which once distinguished shades of condescension
in a woman’s voice, now hears only
the slap of water on cypress knees,
the hum of insects asking to be eaten.
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