Epithalamium and Other Poems

Mark Tardi

EPITHALAMIUM

Because in the kitchen, it’s difficult to lie

Because the yearbook photo shows long straight hair parted down the middle, Marcia Brady-style

Because in my son’s mind, he has only one dziadek & babcia & that blindspot diminishes me more each day

the vanity of everything factual

tea drinkers & their charges

Because you’ve gotten me so pissed off that I’m crawling

like a roadside forger of wounds

the preferred hymns
of insects

of all the world’s cobblers

Because yesterday dinner was a roadrunner, the wrong coat, a spark that bled repeatedly

Because what’s a necessity for a dancer, for a puppet is merely a circumstance

the end of all that being looked at

not a rational attic or
cybernetic bee

Because traversal becomes fractal becomes lacy potato, which you made but rarely ate

Because I don’t want to be put in the ground

a reservoir for true forgiveness, inexhaustible

residing in somebody else’s memories

like trying to describe
the entire architecture of a house

by staring at one square tile on the floor

Because siusius don’t have hands or eyes or a buzia or legs

Because there are no statistics to support this feeling

ELEGY FOR THAT CLOUD-KILL GATE CAKE

when that the shadow-flash stutters

when that such a pulse of phosphorus could have had other evolutionary consequences

the jellyfish journey
so bright with defiance

when that men bend heaven to their methods

time its own kind of villain
playing at molecules

as if it could be used for bowling

as if to retrieve that valuable down a dropped sink or stop
the toilet tank sweating

goose the right hinge

wearing a dead man’s ears
the reminder of another person’s sleep

automated to a Jesuit tinge
a stern ball shaped & cyclical

when that we may not shipwreck in the meanwhile

ELEGY FOR THE TIN EDGE OF RAIN

It’s 2023 & you’re drinking Folgers,
like your father

who attacked pleasure

with an unscientific precision
his mood its own weather system,
nettles of implication

bathed in reptilian light                        or those indirect gifts

a mosquito-fucked Monday
the tenuous alibi slurred
brushing against sham

like some linear inevitability

I guarantee you one thing

a proof of the Pythagorean theorem
doesn’t need to be a conversation

nor another clipping from the Sun-Times
tracking an engineer’s average annual salary

Let’s mute the intrusion

the BVDs an ever-present accomplice
to the untied robe, Old Style & smokes in hand

all so very un-ninja-like

flatulence a stealth prayer
bound into the dark tissues,                 seal-sung

whether arm, ankle, or thumb,
all I bought was brokenness

the way chaos has a shape                    its own acoustic etiquette

or how still the Toyota was
with its spidered windshield & open door

emptied of everything

all the bedside chats at 3:00 a.m.                      or those when I feigned sleep
not to occur but survive

the glare of stolen time
grotesque but sentient

thighs crosshatched from failed skin grafts,
a whiteboard & notebook for the odd jotting

voiceless in the end, an open wound
for a neck

doesn’t make any difference

PROTOCOLS OF FINISH

Because the hand is not a conclusion, a physical yes

or lesson in agreed contradiction

ballerinas of doom,
sister shapes

mistaken for a spider in the snow

to pulse reality

Because there are times when a dog’s wheezing sounds like a boy crying

reflexively beheading the world

Because potatoes are an invasive species

stains the material & method
to reset a landscape

Because paintings are not windows, funneled

into space

to hit the floor
you have no choice
but to believe in

Because it’s really hard to know when you’re lucky and when you’re smart

Because the loophole’s welcomed in the land of confiscatory taxes

the ecstatic restraint
tentative geometry

locked into a scaffold reminiscent of switchboard wires

a relay decades in the making

TRIPLE CANOPY CASINO

Sometimes I host parties in here.
Sometimes guests attend.
I move a few plants to one side then.

To make room for the limbo contest.  
[Production of a pole.]
Sometimes I lose.

Sometimes I ask the guests if they would like to tango with me.
They don’t.

You are strong in limbo. Your mother probably loves you.

Sometimes I attempt to amuse my guests with witty banter.
I will say something like “Celery is the lettuce of the vegetable world” or
“The only thing to be taken seriously is death.”

Sometimes they laugh.

Sometimes I play cards with my guests.
Poker usually.
The plants tell me what hands my guests have.

Sometimes I win.
Sometimes my guests have hands.