Tranquil
by Bryan Walpert
I’ll probably cut this line,
maybe this one, too, and the next,
the one that describes the blanket—
it’s no good, you keep it,
the line, I mean, though you can have
the old blanket, too, whose rough wool
scratched us all winter on that couch
you’ve taken with the music and the Terrier,
leaving only a few unmatched dishes
and a memory I no longer want:
the day the snow surprised the city—
you at one end of the park,
me at the other, dog by your side,
the spot we were to meet in the middle
an objective correlative of all compromises
with which we would surely collude,
the whole silly city out shovelling,
the white world masquerading
as some sort of moment—take it all, crate it
up with the photos, pop it all in the boot
along with all that we once felt
for one another, take everything
but this poem you’ll never see
me cut line by line:
fold, spindle, mutilate—it’s going,
you’re in charge, my queen, my subject
no longer, once I’ve cut these last few
about the books we'd planned to read, the dog
I'll tell you now I hated, the day I can’t stop
thinking about, which ended with a blanket,
an old couch, and started with the snow
laid out between us like this cold, blank page.
Bryan Walpert is the author of three poetry collections—Etymology, A History of Glass, and Native Bird—as well as the fiction collection Ephraim’s Eyes and the scholarly monograph Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge). A defense of poetry, Poetry and Mindfulness, is forthcoming this year. He teaches Creative Writing as an Associate Professor in the School of English & Media Studies at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. Learn more at bryanwalpert.com.