Someone in Pontiac, Michigan
thinks I am pretty,
I say you should have seen me
when I was six months old,
my flesh the flesh of a partridge,
my legs spread by a steel bar,
my perfect feet in orthopedic shoes
bolted to the bar.
I tell him the whole twentieth century
was basically a mistake,
I tell this not to him but to my bathrobe,
who is linted and old and ignores me.
She’s been on dope for years.
She’s never been outside.
She looks at me through the wrong end
of a telescope and goes on chewing her sleeves.
Finally I start to get dressed
and when she’s lying on the bed she says,
your capacity for suffering is infinite—
how much fun we could have had if it was not—
I pick her up,
and we pass the afternoon in communal affection
without which the most benign of god’s creatures
would inconsolably wither.