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.

 
 
 
_________________________________________________________
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.