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A Life of Crime

Frail friends, I love you all!
Maybe that’s the trouble,
storm in the eye of a storm.
Everyone wants too much.
Instead we gratefully accept
some stylized despair:
suitcoats left hanging
on folding chairs, snow falling
inside a phonebooth, cows
scouring some sad pasture.
You know the sort of landscape,
all sensibility and no trees.
Nothing but space, a little
distance between friends.
As if loneliness didn’t make us
responsible, and want accomplices.
Better to drink at home
than to fall down in bars.
Or to read all night a novel
with missing heirs, 513 pages
in ten-point type, and lay my body
down, a snarl of urges
orbited by blood,
dreaming of others.

William Mathews
.

Laurent Orseau

No Return

I like divorce. I love to compose

letters of resignation; now and then
I send one in and leave in a lemon-
hued Huff or a Snit with four on the floor.
Do you like the scent of a hollyhock?
To each his own. I love a burning bridge.

I like to watch the small boat go over
the falls — it swirls in a circle
like a dog coiling for sleep, and its frail bow

pokes blindly out over the falls’ lip
a little and a little more and then
too much, and then the boat’s nose dives and butt

flips up so that the boat points doomily
down and the screams of the soon-to-be-dead
last longer by echo than the screamers do.
Let’s go to the videotape, the news-
caster intones, and the control room does,

and the boat explodes again and again.

– William Matthews

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