tom benediktsson
The Motive for Metaphor
It's not the cheesy tunes,
the gaudy costumes,
not the crooked, colluding judges
nor the crowd's fickle roar.
And it's not the beauty or the daring,
lutz, toe loop or camel,
not even her risky spin
into a brilliant airborne triple salchow.
None of those things.
It's the cursive, elliptical,
cryptic trace she left behind
of what was promised and withheld,
what was expressed
and what concealed.
And therefore it's also the slow erasure,
the wiping clean, the return
to purity and blankness,
the dominant, fatal, arrogant
Zamboni.
Existence Precedes Essence
On the night when Sartre
gives that existentialism talk, my father
switches off the shortwave radio
and raises his eyebrows at my mother,
shall I wear the eyepatch, oh yes
the eyepatch, and she, shall I wear
the peignoir, oh yes the peignoir,
oh Simone, oh Jean-Paul,
as the old Cobleskill farmhouse
becomes a fantasy left-bank
apartment, and soon enough the outcome
of this little divertisement
is the release of some hundred
million sperm cells, one of which
we will call little Tommy,
tiny swimmer who survives
the mass slaughter of all
of his siblings, go little Tommy go,
I think I can I think I can,
indefatigably flagellating upstream
through the broken condom, the vinegar
douche, and all the other failed efforts
to keep him from my mother's egg
and the fissions of that little spark of life,
two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two,
sixty-four, fifty million million human cells,
all of whom, almost exactly 60 years
after that speech in Paris and that night
of pleasure in an old Cobleskill farmhouse,
float, very improbably, on a lake
in the central Washington Cascades,
smoking a Macanudo cigar.
