Miss

 

Miss

 

You’ll miss me when I’m gone -

and she might.

 

Like waters closing quarters over a shipwreck

dragged down until the upper deck

is nothing less than a defiant turret

the struts and frets

its hour upon the seabed and collects

barnacle crusts and wasted mussels.

 

Watch, boy, as she folds into folds,

pulls herself over like tarpaulin covers holes

or sticks conceal a trap

you read between the pages of some crap

book set in a mysterious coffee shop

or convenience store selling slop.

 

She owns it, you know? That shop.

Many were the years she sat, waiting,

push change with fingers, contemplating

your arrival, counting coin,

round and round

like ice poked with a stick,

behind her desk and there she sits.

 

In her domain, my Snow Queen,

oh, and how there have been

so many, in multitudes of Bechers Brook,

writing disoriginal books

with disapproving looks, ah, those looks,

and pens that stuck their foot in the craw

where you might not find

no capacitor to be kind, just a resistor.

 

Never kill your darlings, he said,

refuse her, thank god for daily bread,

here’s a lip curler of contemptuous sneer,

no room for kindness here –

you’ll end up on the cutting room floor.

 

Concourse an airport, where

her new employee, anxious, checking time,

settiing compass for some warmer clime.