by Mara Jebsen
I met a tipsy older lady in a place;
She said, “Honey, it doesn't really come clear
'til you're sixty.” But she wouldn't say
what. The television was blaring
about chimpanzees. Some journalist
had likened our president to a chimp.
Meanwhile, a chimp named Travis
was reported to have sipped
wine; and more recently tea, laced with Xanax,
before his “unprecedented
killing spree.” The reporters said Travis
“had no history of violence,” but one of
my students, who'd grown up in T's town
knew a guy Travis had attacked-back
when they were kids. The bartender, Gene
checked it on his i-phone, and there were photos
of the owner–or should I say “mother?” snuggled
up tight with the chimp, before bed.
It's a modern tragedy, they said (Travis
is dead now) and there's such vague pity
and unlocalized outrage that I can't figure out
what I'm thinking.
Yesterday I sat kind of across from Justin
Timberlake. He had juice. I was eating
a Cuban sandwich. I wanted to tell him
that my sisters adore his albums; that he cracked
me up in his leotard when he danced on SNL,
and that I really wasn't sure about his clothing
line idea, but Jessica Biel was there
and I didn't have the nerve. Can any
of this really come clear, when you're
sixty? The lady was ripping pages
out of a magazine from Sotheby's. She said,
“You want em?” ” I took the good art out.”
and I took them gently from her
because it seemed polite. She'd left
La Misericorde, which is a man
in a suit, whose head is an eyeball, and near him
is a fire, on a strange blue plain. The caption says
Magritte shows the modern man, confronted
by fetish, desire, the unknown. There's a squarish
object in the great, healthy fire—but its not
at all clear what's burning.