Tennessee Williams Sings the Wimbledon Anthem
Diabetic feet and shins
Polished gleaming hairless white,
Sheathed in
Milk chocolate brown
Stocking foot waders creased
All the way down
To toes
He no longer feels in the frigid stream,
His nerve-damaged legs
Forking under an inner tube,
The drag of black
Rubber fins,
Listless in current between the meanders,
Effervescent below his knees,
The fly fisher whips a graphite rod
Back and forth,
Over his shoulder,
Back and forth,
Over his shoulder
Like a flagellant penitent,
Paying out line
To metallic squawks of the ratchet wheel
And the clicking pawl,
Neon orange
High visibility filament
Oscillating sharply over his head,
Each undulation
Refining the impulse, increasing the speed
Until, the rod tip loaded with
Stored energy,
A frequency as waves
Unfurls
Along the weight-forward taper
(What hooks
Is too light to cast
By design)
So it kisses the surface of water above the trout.
A shadow of roof beam
Slams through the channel
That as sinuous stream
Crosses, re-crosses the axis down valley
A glacier withdrew from while crawling up into itself,
Erratic boulders in its wake
The outer banks
Carried off little by little
Will someday erode out from under:
Self-intensifying helical flow
A feedback loop
(Positive)
Swelling the amplitude
As the vortex
At the center of each cutbank
Gains momentum.
Greater curvature results in greater erosion, which results
In greater curvature….
Abandoned meanders and oxbows, cut-off loops
Left without an active cutting stream, ridge and swale topography,
In the wake of lateral migration,
Scars the floodplain.
Waveform
Of water moving over land
Makes of the nethermost crease in the channel a vertex.
The glut of sugar in his blood
A perpetual spike
His insulin can’t blunt, the old
Fly fisher, lost in the swarm of his hyperglycemia,
Bitterest torrent of gloom and delusion,
Ruminates future and past.
After Moulting, the Insect Driven Mad in the Light of the Moon, or The Moveable Empty Center of Everything
En pointe on thumbscrew dividers
Calibrated to linear scale,
His mind steps off projective space
To the dissident outpost of what he desires,
A target bivouacked
And circumscribed by pivots,
Tremulous, billowing
Under the wide-angle lens of obsession.
The distance that separates man and his target
The prismatic distance, the distance that refracts
Between the same idea resonant in different minds.
The most important thing.
The only thing.
The target is everything
The target is not.
The target's a black drawstring sack
Worn over the mans’ head,
Letting him see, letting him see
Everything the target is not.
Leaning forward, in a listening pose,
He fans the knives and holds them up
Like he can see the row of fine, double-edged points.
In a leotard trimmed with flapper beads
The woman isn't wearing pantyhose,
but no one in the audience can tell.
Under the flawless white skin of a natural redhead
Without superfluous flesh
Toned muscles of hips and thighs
Emit a high-pitched sound
Only lap-dogs and knife-throwers can hear.
The black bag vibrates with a frequency the stylus of his mind
Etches in the darkness. The target’s an idea
Connecting man and woman like a compass with dividers fixed
At the angle the distance between them refracts.
Gashes bound the paper moon onstage.
The spinning motion of the diaphragm slows down; the man rips it away.
Wearing the smudge of a fencer's elliptical mask
The insurance company ordered be worn for the evening performance,
The woman steps out of the ruptured membrane
And, with a flourish, removes her mask,
Taking in every member of the audience at once:
Faces arrayed on the edge of a curve that’s her whole world:
Wherever she looks
And whatever she sees
Falling away,
Off the edge of the empty moveable center of everything.
________
Mark Parsons' poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Expat Press, Dreich, Cape Rock, and I-70 Review. His book of poems, Stills, was published by Southernmost Books in 2023. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Mark Parsons is on X @parsons_mfa
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