In the middle of getting dressed,
ambushed by a mirror,
I'm brought up halt and shamed
before the paunch.
It isn't a gut or beer belly,
a spare tire or love handles,
but something sinister, something
beyond the often tender misshapenness
of me.
Suddenly, I'm not young anymore
and that twenty-five-year-old poet
who liked my work, who spoke
with a voice like dusk, who swept
waves of thick jet hair
from her face as she spoke,
really only liked my work.
How awful. How sad
to be entering the realm
of the fathers.
There is no hope unless it be
a twig of slippery elm,
a perfectly blue dinner plate,
a flower I don't remember ever seeing
that gives off the spice
of a woman's sun-warmed back.
Where are those magical things?
How to find them?
And if I should master the elements,
what then?
I'd still be Prospero at best,
that old bag of tricks, vengeful,
clinging to his beautiful daughter.
Sit ups are, of course, out of the question.
This goes way beyond fitness.
This is the one grey hair
I spend mornings searching for
and pluck like a fat autumn shrew
from its lair.
Fierce and merciless like an owl,
I hover over the ruins of my life.
Trying to s** the demon in, I fall
three waist lines short of Valhalla.
Christ have mercy!
Keep me far from mirrors
and voices like dusk
in which the Angelus rings
and the stars rise,
for I am only a poet, a fat poet
heartsick with desire
and fastened to a dying animal.