Distracted

for C.K. Williams

Charles, forgive me for I am distracted and the peculiar wolfish light
of your poems has been refracted by my moony frame of my mind.

My inattention to the minuscule detail daubed into the grain of the page
I'll compare laughably to Hamlet's inability to kill a king,

to the howling winds of Elsinore keep, to the brazen windy farts
of an off-, off-, very off-Broadway audience, say the Bowery, say Fayette County;

the rain pearling at the window and the pliant resigned mews of a white
cat in a denim lap wage a hushed war conscripting my wife's arsenal

of potted plants and the relentless sizzling explosions strafing the skillet
under her expert hand and the lovely red rain of spices that glimmer

down into the wide black eye of the dinner pan; the peppery aroma
redolent of her humid breath and the late summer nights in Baltimore

when the curtains were left lashed and the neighbor across the way
got a good look at our shared red skin; Charles, let's pinkie swear

someday to share a summer solstice, hold it between us like a document,
the terms of my surrender bold as the signature of a founding father,

your words measured as a tailor's tape no longer groping at the smooth
face of my negligence, my dreams no longer of Anna but of the lesser vagaries of art.



Kristofer Collins is the Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine and the publisher of Low Ghost Press.