Not so simple being both asp
& then caduceus,
this falling
always headlong into Eiffel
or under Acropolictic
ruin. Today our man is feeling
semi-
pseudo, only somewhat
so, & so he walks across
our crosswalks, his forehead’s
warning forever unread. By the
third hour, he turns
circumspect. What does he see?
He blinks in
big neon glitter, blinks out
hounds to the left of him, jackals
to the right. What
does he hear? Choirs rise
out of howling. He tries writing
our history in his longhand
but its logic
sometimes lies: darkling autocorrects
to sparkle, flashes its black but then
goes away white.
What’s left to be said? Disappointed,
he throats & then his earlobes
spill quotidian like a letter
never sent. This is not his world.
This is windows
into could-is, his gimping
toward more.
*****
Chris McCreary’s most recent book of poems is Undone: A Fakebook (Furniture Press, 2010), and a new chapbook, Elseworlds, is forthcoming from Cy Gist Press. An earlier version of “Reckoning” was published, under a different title and at about half its current length, in a limited-edition chapbook that accompanies the album You Make A Better Door Than A Window by Daniel Hales and the frost heaves (2012).