Calves
The crisper drawers
are the refrigerator’s calves.
The backsides of tires
are the calves of cars.
As high as the mist rises up
from where the white cords of falling water
plunge into the blue lagoon
is how high the calves
of a waterfall are.
A campfire’s calves
are comparatively low
for they’re its glowing embers.
Why can’t we see
the Statue of Liberty’s calves?
Asking a question
in a poem
is the calves of wanting to know.
Complicit Poetry
Instead of always striving for beauty,
depth and humility,
connection and transcendence,
what if poems shamelessly championed
superficiality?
Reinforced self-absorption?
Routinely advanced patently counterfeit
“observations” as if they were lived,
and from them drew conclusions complicit
with all the greatest crimes of the age?
What if bad actors took shits on the stage?
Drained from their day jobs
of brutally straightening the world,
what if idiots convinced
that the spirit isn’t vast
bent patterns of sound after hours
to completely invent a convenient past?
What if poems were not benign?
What if every inch of aesthetic terrain
staked out by history’s sturdiest verses
was summarily conceded
to hysterical materialism,
velvet rope nihilism,
proto-cyberpunk pseudo-populism,
and simple, country greed?
Could such poems still feed us?
Fill our troughs with nutritious-enough slop
in some backward, fucked up way?
What would their unique currency be?
Concretizing the compromises
we all make every day anyway?
Sometimes coping is a form of theater,
and I may be doing that here,
but isn’t there some famous character
in some broadly famous myth
whose monumental malice was dismantled
when narrative circumstances conspired
to plunk down a mirror in the middle of their path?
A mirror too wide to be gotten around,
too tall to scale, too hard to crack,
and so misplaced as to be impossible
not to look at, forcing the villain
to reckon with their reflection
for the first time—how covered in gore
they were, how alone, how far
behind them the trail of ruin
littered with viscera stretched—
and they changed their ways?
Mark Leidner’s latest poetry collection, Elegy for Pangaea, is available here. His previous book, Returning the Sword to the Stone, was named Best Poetry of 2021 by the New York Times. His website is markleidner.com.