The Ill–Tempered Clavier
I sing of
arms and ears in piles,
the collateral we wage against concepts
of order,
and the unstressed strings of prepositions spinning
our heroic yarns, either half–truthful
knots or fabrications after the fact,
leaving you, who chance it daily, to choose,
and no longer to extract act from
word,
since you’re tickled pink to have tossed aside
a good career selling real estate to those
suckers
who won’t accept the illusion of the world
even while they wait for
extraterrestrial
contact and ignore the ingenious ways
we’ve devised to say “Stay
Away,”
to each other included, and intone the hours
with the power a few faint pitches
produce,
those with which God professed a goodness
that (like chickens) supports a theory of
the supreme
being, since I cannot assume such things
exist for their own pleasure, but that,
like knowledge, I can never return to its
Giver,
Author of the fictional systems I sing,
this life unto death, this loan in default.
—Benjamin Paloff
About the Author
Benjamin Paloff’s poems have recently appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Southern Humanities Review. His translation of Dorota Maslowska’s Snow White and Russian Red has just been released.
