LOST COLONY
Laconic (but not lazy), this time the lights stay on.
__The formal fields have their wanton way; cherubs
____go drooling in posterior exterior, dimpled afresh.
____Generously, music unzips, points square to path
__token by no occasion; in need of jetties and sweeties
on some barren arm, a strap for each remembrance.
Gradually recipes and petite orders trade hands.
__Waking ones prepared for in urban-most fashion
____come with speeches: momentary political unrest
____faced as it is fraught without irony or earnestness
__to keep it aside from lurid delicacy where waterfalls
continually re-brush themselves, perennially silent.
As so much can go wrong, a frontier of possibilities
__comes as resultant factor. Chances preen themselves
____on the abstract aftermath of carrying on: slowly
____the scene of one man in his own mental house
__opens onto juicy lawns, each memory perfidious
as the malodorous color green, sharp and stable.
In order for this to work, then, the scene one imagines
__morphs into a scene one already had: its misericord,
____the slightly novel, definitely designer-boutique of it,
____or the special way someone felt about an onion ring—
__devious architectures that assume no new raw stripe
until you can’t go back, though covert looking’s allowed.
Morality: in excess of shoe stores and such penitent
__lecture circuits, oblong muscled people, their highrise
____indiscreet charities, redoubled fence preoccupations,
____garrulous fact-checking; in all of it though that was
__what you were after. You wanted the thing real enough
to redeem pungent exercises of Victoriana: cream slacks
and the cherry lordship one could try to freeze in
__a tunnel with forensic goggles, those motley items
____significant because rumored derring-do passed
____over them. Little by little, breath had (or hadn’t)
__shaped them. They encountered the room. Suddenly
you’re face-down in perfunctory December. Content.
One with figurative hardship, sawtooth pay dates.
__Gambits are taken. Galleys are bound. Minister
____divas swap seats, not so much interchangeable
____as finalized: like a permutation’s shirt sleeve.
__The rigor of sleeping reassumes its low position.
Infant tresses are bartered out of habits of thinking
and patterns not so routine overtake any old body
__in the missed journal-entry of existing. Public
____furniture becomes our very own social worker
____doing overtime for affordable comforts: Teflon,
__engagement rings, vaguely spiked luncheon drinks.
If you look out on the world in its sizable wet chunks,
what had been boggling fairgrounds show wrinkles:
__an orphanage becomes single-room-occupancy
____after being a hotel or some industrial hang out—
____the jive spot for motor tourists in a motorless city.
__Daffy light strings a certain body, one beautifully
at ease in its command of easy absent-headedness.
Gazillions of people evaporate onwards, as they like.
__To begrudge them that would be worse than not to.
____Only a few are thinking of the toolshed, the heavy
____way that formalized manners elect themselves
__in slushy openings, grafted onto this day, the next.
Your job: to murder each while no one is watching.
__________________________________________
Adam Fitzgerald is a New York City based poet and founding editor of the poetry journal . In 2010, he received his MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space,, , , and . He teaches at Rutgers University and The New School. His debut collection of poetry, The Late Parade, will be published by W.W. Norton/Liveright in June 2013.
