Two Poems...............................Jake Weiss

JAKE WEISS (AB’20)

A Portrait of Flannery Miller

What she is Is not so much A tulip; rather,

A fresh red conundrum Drumming To my breastbone.

Top hat reposed On her restless shoulder, Her figure realized

By the velvet dress, Her eyes sojourn here, Her mouth: A dimensional

Wallop. Fair Flannery, Glued to each star flake In the burgeoning sky,

What is your horizon, The one you see? Am I? I

Am not allowed to wonder. Am fed Strict calculus Through a meat machine.

I’ve already begun to love Flat Flannery when The fat man accosts me

(Sir, step away From The painting)

And I would love To continue loving Her; To continue loving Flannery would be an apple Dripping in bronze, My wiring

Dissolved to pink Bubbling air. But I cannot Proceed. Seagulls breeze

In the mind Of my wind, and Where am I, Flannery,

Next to be whisked? Behind some new Artifical blockade

Made for bruised and bony Figments like myself And you? Hustle me along

To the next orchard, A pleading crescent Of pallid night. I am not

Allowed to wonder, to wander, to Walk in a line. You and I are Becoming a We, I feel, oh Fading,

Flippant Flannery, “a We, Oh Flannery, a We!—” Static jolts my jaw. How often

I must be remanded, Reminded: I am not To wonder aloud.

She was in a box. She was fixating vividly On boxes. Was affording piqued attention To new blue mold on rich red Raspberries. She fixed Herself a crooked spliff. Four grams later Her grammar slips beneath A blushing willow. Comforts of God brush her Under: slalom nightmares Feeding again and again the beast of Her minute hand. She is woken By the prospect of there being a sun, Though he is soon and yet to peek. When Is she to know? She must anticipate All the returns: ferns to foxes, coughs To fevers, pills, quakes, bluster and Love in its twenty-one-thousandOdd means of self-exposure. She is boxing with raspberry eyelids, The left one verging on Currant. She knows fear in the heart Of its biome. The spider cracks And gold, pollinated expanses Abandoned by cardinals, bared For her estranged dance, her muscular Panic. When is she to untether? Rocks between banyans to listen. She does not know but wants to know She is her own Green willingness, thumb Plastered to camera: the first violets. II.

Contemporary, her gait. Favorite tune Temporary, a half-life, a bass clef, Page-bound bars vibrating a cello.

Unsatisfactory. Rain boring somnolent Windows in walls, holes in windows Lick her cerebrum She has grown to smack and Smooth in carefully administered

Doses: pink tactile teardrops sent between What she believes is her visage, knows Is her nape. Paper gradually befalls

The hideous typewriter Burping sweet plum, the sunny catastrophe of The heart. Fonder by the day of her

Extemporaneity. She swills Herself among merlot sulfites by The glass’s stem, to pass the time. Her glasses Droop. Stems her waking hours By the violet root.