WHAT AM I NOT A MAKER
Is it possible to know you must apologize with everything you have for offering the perfect gift? How could that even feel? It sounds occult. I want it, and somehow I speak for everyone. It’s beautiful. I know it’s beautiful. You don’t need to write So beautiful. I’m trying to know I’m actually sorry that a perfect gift is just and condescending. Here’s your gold balloon-ear, screaming kid who sat on gold balloon-bee And I’ve got a ton of leather crystal pouches in the trunk I’m driving to the silent concept-ballad auction at that new lyceum Put on zeppelin? There’s a kind of justice Okay? You feel scathing disappointment? Does that work? Can you imagine or at least describe a kind of justice that is purely visual and without motion, form or color but still practical, whose application is so broad that any gross or reasonable distinction between humans, even animals and humans won’t pertain, cannot pertain, cannot have ever pertained? Sorry I was only here to be frightened on a table of stone three feet high or a table of vanishing stone as three feet high as possible with water and a sun that could support life and everything— it’s not a joke, not now and given time anything will happen.
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Macgregor Card is a poet, bibliographer and translator living in Queens. A new chapbook, The Archers, just came out from Song Cave. His first full-collection, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, was published in December ’09 by Fence Books. From 1997-2005 he co-edited The Germ: A Journal of Poetic Research with Andrew Maxwell (archives up at www.germspot.blogspot.com). He teaches poetry at Pratt Institute.