Sculpture Gardens: Morris Arboretum: Philadelphia, Pa.

 

Self-Portrait: Adam Fieled, Plymouth Meeting, 2022

 

Something Solid: The Nineties: Silly Putty

The brave-hearted poetics of sex—
possessed, possessive of impulses
to fling one’s self into another,
then fling one’s self into a world
in which things turn into, become,
other things— the first thing I
think of is State College, the dim
recollection of screwing Jennifer
on the Old Main lawn, dusk of
a long day in May— where I was
was where I wasn’t, as Jennifer
also was, wasn’t, chiaroscuro comes
into us in the idea of durations— I
had no idea, in sex & metaphor, what could die.

Just for the insanity of her, & why,
Jen remains a surprise, & the wildest of my wives.
A self-possessed, pixilated individual,
stacked like a Playboy bunny, mad as a hatter,
refashioning class like it was silly putty,
we bonded at the crotch like two young bunnies,
just for her to be a mother, just to make silken-soft
the bitterness of a broken life in the sticks—
the stigma of trailer-trash insignias, which here
camouflaged as lower-middle before my naïve eyes.
The pill she was purportedly on was more
camouflage— I forgive her now because she
had no choice, backed under trailer wheels.
Corn-rows fell on her, & dirty deals.

New Poem in Otoliths (65)

 

New double sonnet, from the Nineties section of Something Solid, in Otoliths 65. Many thanks to Mark Young. And on PennSound.

Here is Otoliths 65 in its entirety. And in print.