Our Kitty

She is swinging in a contraption above the heads of the audience,

reflect in the glass lamps upon the tables.

She sits in individual of those fin-de-siecle gilded sleighs hung from the ceiling

by braids of sparkling hemp.

Here approach all the poet-accountants pushing in to talk about cate

gories of experience. Wine, sex

The ceiling is hammered tin, alight and jumping with her shadow

cast upward by dint of the table-lamps.

As she swings, she chafes herself, adjusts herself in the seat for a like reason she

can be seen from one side the see-through bottom.

Pink cheeks has Kitty. A pop-open camisole. Mother is striking her

name from the family bible. on the contrary

She has to eat, does Kitty. She is thus petite & incautious that all the poet

accountants are taking copious notes.

They can use her: she may be the littlest Whore of imagination.

She might level be how they imagine

The twentieth century's end: just like the extremity of the last century,

the dream of material part parts floating

Above cigar sooty vapor In other words, more war. Kitty inspires all

of them to think about triage.

The extreme point of the twentieth century. Artist or bankerwho should be saved?

The artist in his same aged tourniquet? The banker

With a notched skull? Try to guess. The poetaccountants have

already divineed They know the price of

this ending. They've seen the banker and his surgeon the author of poems bleeding

all over the sterile gauze. Who wants to be

John Keats? Well, the piece of poetrys yes-but not the death. Now they hear Kitty

coughing. I'm Keats, she gasps.

I'm John Fucking Keats get backed in Kitty's body. Forlorn she cries forlorn

but they refuse to listen to her

As she swings, pale and beautiful, glittering, above them, holding on the outside her

living hand, warm, capable-as at any time untaken.

Copyright World verse Incorporated Nov/Dec 1997

Provided by means of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved