#MIDDLEBURY
from “[the old soiled carpet of the wish to be Anais]”
Wayne Koestenbaum
writing on the bruised
body and seeing into the
bruise’s locked backyard, not
psychoanalyzing the incursion
but appreciating its scissory
up and down
_________
remembering the wish
to be Anais Nin-
_________
stepping on the old soiled
carpet of the wish to be Anais –
_________
liking
the pullulation of scratch marks
and their glistering anonymity
_________
florid
British perfume wrongly purchased
for stepfather-the perfume stank
so why did I buy it?
_________
the entire sky
with a palette knife is scratched
turquoise opal –
no underlying tint to betray it
_________
a sick tint inundating the marsh
_________
I celebrate mother’s sunset
or I am cloud making her
sunset more inspiringly Turneresque –
_________
to scratch through the page until
it dies, and no credit given
to the scratcher
About this poem
“This poem is a tiny excerpt from my trance trilogy’s second volume, ‘Camp Marmalade,’ to be published in fall 2017 by Nightboat Books. The first volume was ‘The Pink Trance Notebooks.’ Aphorism, lament, notation, murmur, scratch: Am I the ‘sick tint’ inundating my own language?” – Wayne Koestenbaum
About Wayne Koestenbaum
Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of “The Pink Trance Notebooks” (Nightboat Books, 2015). He is a distinguished professor of English, French and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and lives in New York City.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2017 Wayne Koestenbaum. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
