Poem: Fleet Week

Fleet Week

By Zeke Greenwald 
QuailBellMagazine.com 

What else could I do with the half white eyelash
on my bifocals where streak and where sash

light fixtures askew, severed from the wall:
where faintly my haircut about my ears falls:
my frames double exposed with my rear view;
Geronimo! hairs themselves skydiving threw;
with dandruff powder that my fingers moved;
as over our sophisticated flat loomed
plans for book cases, tables, and chairs,
wardrobes, bed frames less than the width of our stairs;
but compare it eventually to fleet week
and the week I moved somewhat intriguingly
like the particolor of my mascaraless lash
half prepped for a microscope, settled on glass.
 
Oh! Didn’t we live so close to the ocean?
It’s air would brine the place where our flith floated
for at least that year. There gulls took flight and wavered;
there jelly fish were half flushed toilet paper.
But we moved to fester elsewhere, for a time.
Already our moving boxes, a mess of a kind,
maligned our new space: already dissatisfied,
we carried my twin mattress through the maritime
suits, white, trimmed blue, with pins like semaphore,
displayed while dutifully feasting on the shore.
From the roof tops no sea birds yawed down the brick,
but sailors swooned on steady streets, stood drinks
by citizens to keep the sea’s weary tokens
near me. With ocean, land and space were broken
on the sidewalk seats wearing purple beads;
then when I faced away, the gutters, seemed,
in the street, from the one reverse instruction,
stelled like the spotted gleam on the construction
ongoing in the road.
 
So all that’s left to do
is to make a sailor of my lash that moved.
Similar, if I said black had obtained blue
(three such literary instances I knew:
Flaubert, Browning, and Nabokov) then in
color of their uniform I thus alleged!
 
Also reminiscent of when to clean
my glasses so the filth might be well seen
I hold them low, and I can see the floor.
I see the staggered hair, but the floor no more.
Focus past the flakes and curving brow hair,
then I see my face upon the floor there.
 

#Unreal #Poem #FleetWeek #FlithFloating #Eyelash 

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