XXVII. Superfluous Man

“Might he not be, in fact, a parody?” —Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Here like a man in traction I lie sprawling

with one foot propped up on a blood-red sofa.

My heel imprints the arm. A tasseled loafer

hangs from my toetips on the verge of falling.

A warm draft fills the room. The tassel stirs.

I watch its quiet writhing with dispassion.

Outside the clouds drift in and out of fashion.

My lover’s flown away. The sofa’s hers.

My nails are nubs, worn by compulsive buffing

amid perpetual dreams of her beside me

stroking my brow, or roughhousing astride me

until the cushions burst with horsehair stuffing.

Stains in the armpits of my silk pajamas

expand, expand … I’m everything I’ve dreaded:

one long quotation awkwardly embedded,

gripped in the clawed tongs of inverted commas

from my first jabbering to my last faint terror.

How many of me can the copier copy

before the ink runs low, the job grows sloppy,

even the hope of some unusual error

diminishes to blankness? … Heirloom portraits

gloat from the far wall, whispering: To live

is to be painfully derivative.

Why pout about it? Were you hoping your traits

would turn out to be more than ours restored?

That they were just so many “self-made riches”?

A horsehair worms into my shirt and itches.

I scratch. My nail-nubs bleed. I am not bored:

her ghostly image lingers, still engrossing.

In her dark eyes I was original once—

at least, I felt a twinge of renaissance...

Till I collapsed into this mode of posing,

arranged my life and limbs in this grand flop.

I sweat, I itch … How long will one pose hold

before the body gives up, or grows old?

The tassel stirs. The loafer does not drop.