Closet Vision
Holed up behind the whitewashed wooden slats
slung like ribs above the greed-begotten candy plaster-
papered noworlaters, holed up and far
from witches in the woods’ evergreen fringe,
horse chestnut brews, parents’ crow commotion or
robin squabble haranguing the fat
wide open always out there, I read for hours
on the red shag rug hearing market cry
and grave slope, catching the men through ages
of flint and full haggle in my 2 by 6 chamber,
heart bent on Blue Beard, the dead wives’
skeletons cantilevered to a door hook. Later,
hunkering down with amputee hangers,
catalogs, the bottle stash and jug wines,
Jim Beams too hiding with air, no air,
plus a stolen Joy of Sex circa 1974,
its pell mell positions and crouching
women, with the POV going scrap and rattle,
some theater of being a little less bright.
Thought I saw one night the million paired eyes
swinging upward, the hand me down generations
spelunking in holes, fine lineaments braved
by way of cream curd and lust and dictatorial DNA,
felt through overhead squib and carpet warp,
some full squat before the slate rock hearths,
more buried in strata of granites, igneous,
limestone, ash, the mind’s eye leveled
to one rectangle of light around the animal
who wants to know that it knows and say so,
lumbering down the long path, vanishing.
Copyright Credit: Pimone Triplett, "Closet Vision" from Supply Chain. Copyright © 2017 by Pimone Triplett. Reprinted by permission of University of Iowa Press.