maggy mag ｜ issue 3
poem to make you levitate
I began the day wanting the sea, the shoreline
and a group of nudes beginning their day by looking
at the sea – an attempt to demonstrate self-consciousness,
the turning of a wheel that demands the throwing
of oneself before it and the getting up and dusting
oneself off and walking to the sea. I kept beginning
the day in this way, and it struck me one of the nudes
should be hideously disfigured, will have stayed
on his towel while the others walked down to the sea,
and the wheel will have been poised beside him,
arrested by the way he folds his brow. He will
have been thinking about his childhood, and by turns,
about futures, a mutual exclusivity, to his mind. Or rather,
say, two retired musicians teaching music will have
taken some time off to plan an Off-Broadway show,
a pastiche of New York musical genres, to showcase
their polyphony – by nature, an impossibility, which
will have predicated its planning to begin with, though
each musician will have been offered a stipend or honorary
something as pay for a night that could have been
spent otherwise. In other words, the silence
will have been the blade my tongue could never be.
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