October 2018
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
NOTE: I live in Wakefield, Massachusetts and teach at Boston University.  I have a new book out this month, The Posthumous Papers of Sidney Fein.  It’s long but otherwise difficult to describe.  Hsi-wei Tales, a cycle of stories with verses about an imaginary Chinese peasant/poet, is to be out next year.      

These two poems are melancholy.  The first is a sort of elegy for any funny man, though I was thinking of the late Robin Williams; the second anatomizes a trio of brush-offs.

​A Comedian

​
Imagine, he said, a horseradish layer cake.
It took some time to conjure that up, then
a little more to get the point, nearly.
We guessed he meant you can make something
sweet out of what’s bitter, or that looks sweet,
or that the best jokes tend to bite back.
 
We thought he was an alchemist who
could transmute leaden pain to something bright
and yellow.  We forgot alchemy’s a cheat.
Bitter battles against bitterness he fought
and was ever victorious, we thought.  We never
once suspected that he might lose the war.
 
 
 
 

Trois Adieux


I’ll see you later.  That’s what you said and it
was as though you meant you weren’t seeing me,
as if for weeks I’d been fading, blurring, so
you could barely make me out, and that for
now you regretted this but that later (in the
day, the century?) you hoped, even intended, to
survey me face to heel, a promise I’d be seen
at last all in all, my anxiety, my love, my spleen.
 
I can’t do this anymore.  And what, one is
left to wonder, is this?  Such a duplicitous
accordion of a pronoun, this.  This napkin.
This thistle.  This cosmos.  This ache. 
This intimacy that you used to, but can no
longer, do. Do?  But was it just a thing you did,
an act, a series of verbs?  Does be mean to do?
Should I think the calendar changed, not you?
 
This isn’t easy for me.  No.  But that’s only
because I’m here. When I’m no longer here
it won’t have been so hard; at least it will recede
into a past pale as an old aquarelle’s misty
wash. What you mean is, please sympathize
with me as I cause you pain because then
it won’t be difficult for me to say so long,
meaning you were always right and I was wrong.      
       “A Comedian” first appeared in BlazeVox
   “Trois Adieux” first appeared in Eunoia Review
 © 2018 Robert Wexelblatt​
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