Where’d My Uterus Go?
with all those lingering falling down
factories, that sad used up city,
and of course Michael Moore
is there, patron of welfare mothers
and
like an angry maternal deity
persistently knocking
at the gate of the still-born nation, the Corporation,
his heroic face in the window, his sincere heart fat
with is own secret hoard
of uninterviewed, uncatechized
complicities.
Or how about, even weirder, that scary
Himalayan monster,
most lonely and difficult mountain, that’s where my daydreaming
and disobedient emptiness went. A place of monumental
emptiness. A place too remote, too oxygenless,
to warrant even a normally
lyrical name, just a number and a letter, points on a map
relative to other
points on a map.
Or maybe Mount Everest,
Excessively popular, even trashy
by now, though what I'm actually thinking
about is the jet stream sheering
a little off the top, way up at the point of the absolute point,
a bit of delusional snow always lifting
beyond even that,
like thoughts about
or anyplace sane, meaning warm, meaning fertile and green,
but probably of course getting nowhere, dissolving at once in the dangerous heights,
yet launching forth anyway, always just stepping free
of the ground.
That’s enough, don't you think?
Because I resign. I give up. I only ask that life
be intense, even lethal, in its instant.
Nichols © 2003
Draft posted for temporary viewing.