At poetry workshop, my instructor came clean:
        "poetry is washed up. I wasted 20 life-years

        recycling publishing crap - in chapbooks, thin volumes.
        Who knew."

        "Sanitation engineers, "we piped up. "Wrong,
        as usual," she said. "Garbagemen."

        She was 8 chapters into an expose of her obsessed love,
        life with a $million constructionist

        long on insult
        short on battery.

        It was a book, after TV talk-show hullabaloo,
        likely to be remaindered.

        She bought, she told us, her 2x4 ground floor
        peep-in loft with a 2x4 canvas she'd rescued from her

        sinking love bout: jetsam salvaging flotsam.
        "Smaller girls got bigger canvasses," she measured.

        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

        My dancing teacher, showing a sand shuffle, fell on her ass.
        Soar no more. Sore. Sour on dance, tapped out on ball & change.

        Once up on her toes, stumbled in second, in fifth position
        was down on her back, Broadway was a cul-de-sac.

        She felt, she said, "equal parts stretched out jockey shorts
        and dressing-room G-string."

        With some voice, she'd auditioned for a spot pony-
        the short, high-kicking front-line chorus-girl.

        For luck, I'd bought her Papagallos.
        "Red shoes," she threw. "Serge, you jinxed me."

        But it was her time step lacked nanosecond:
        local delivery, no promise. Then

        her dreams of Hollywood,
        more ballistic than balletic,

        turned animated, disneying:
        10 little piggies, all up on their trotters,

        no rent money. She woke in nightmare:
        the Duracell rabbit ran down.

        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

        Hosanna. Thanksgiving. My yoga guide inflated my soul
        under pressure in season for Macy's parade.

        She retails contortion, ever
        ready with guy wires:

        with her palm under my arch,
        I balance my swan on a soiled pongee mat.

        Her soles are echt dirty,
        but I would sip sea-water from her footsteps,

        because she metamorpho-sized me from
        alpha male to neuter tabby.

        Her breathing exercise
        was honeyed hum in my throat.

        In her custody I have bent my spine snakeless,
        south by SW: my equator is flat.

        My bones knit in odd shapes because I believe
        in the power of what she dispenses.

        I was marbled flank steak, now I'm
        cold fish and aiming: she's vegetarian.

        One night I see her in Shmulka Bernstein's eating boiled beef.
        I'm shocked, I enter, I reach her table, my mouth frames "Wha?"

        She summons the water for horseradish,
        and to me she says,

        "Yoga let me down. Don't ask. I want you to change your mantra,"
        and sets me to meditate: "What we love doesn't love us back.

        What we want, we lose quickest.
        Anyway, death comes soon."

        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

        My grave digger shovels a whisper at me.
        "You've got it easy. You come by limo,

        lie in a polished box lined with taffeta,
        and only have 2 questions to answer.

        But for me, my ilk gets less silk. I expect the chevra,
        my lodge-brothers' standard burial:

        they'll drag me by my heels
        unchaste over dry gravel slowly.

        As I came in, except for
        pubic hair, I go out.

        Through the dung gate, scraped, scrapped, so I'd gladly second-mortgage
        my soul to fall into your nice, cool wet grave."

        "What 2 questions?" voiceless
        I asked, abdicating sound.

        "First, what's your name? You see -you with pennies for eyes-
        they need to be sure, no mix-up, you get our due."

        "&?" The digger's iron shovel struck a zinc nail
        and a frank voltaic zinger sizzled me.

        I thought I think again that
        until I am under,

        I am. The second quest:
        did I enjoy the world made for me?

        "No dead fool, "digger said, "it's: who, among friends, gets first
        to throw dirt in your face?"

Copyright © Howard Fisch, 2002.  All Rights Reserved.