Climbing the Anthill

One hour,
one minute at a time.

*

Try looking at it in a different light –
an indifferent light.

    *

Melville said Hawthorne was
“opulent in withheld replies.”

*

Wait, where are you going?
These – those – this –
don’t you know I made it all for you?

Kismet

O to be Howard Keel
polishing my baritone —
throwing my voice
over the side of a wagon,
or the rail of a showboat —
seducing the Fates with my song.

Women would love my swagger,
whether spanking a shrew
or begging in Babylon,
but nothing I’d do could please
Vincente Minnelli
who hated making Kismet
because the studio
forced him to if he wanted to
make Lust for Life.

Now that was a bad movie.

Yodeling in the Void

The echo makes it seem
as if there are two of us,
one moving forward, one hanging back
to study her hand holding onto something
like a lantern. The dark of night is
different from the dark of day.
Picking up odd jobs – waiting
on tables, collecting postcards, stamps.
Sleeping in a skybox—the clouds so close
they spread over the mushy bed like a canopy
or a herd of buffalo dissolving in time,
moving slowly across the glass plains.

Elaine Equi’s latest book is Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press). Other poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Big Other, Long News, and Heavy Feather Review.

Photo by Jerome Sala.

Image: “Lady Day” by Bill Cawley