"To The Penguin Boy" by Lewis Warsh
To The Penguin Boy
The people behind the wall are laughing
at something they saw on television. Her
hair floats over the surface of the pool
like a wreath. All I can hear are the tears
of a clown down through the years. A small
cabin in the woods beneath the
whispering pines.
You can say there were two strands, but of
unequal length. Pictures of mackerel & carp,
an animal starving in its skin. Everything
will be different the next time you pass
through town. It’s pointless to promise something
you can never give.
You can almost see the ocean over the
distant hills. You can gauge the distance
between the hills and the water. The fog
rolls in at the same time everyday.
The victim is not the person who wakes
in the middle of the night. The victim is not
the person who sleeps until noon.
Was it a figure of speech, or an alliteration,
that led us to cross the stream, in slow motion,
between the branches, or something like
the repetition of a heartbeat, that made us
fall asleep on the grass?
All I know is that my own worst enemy
has come to visit. That nothing has changed
in all the years since we first met. Feel free
to sweep up after me as I follow every
path through the past that we call our own.
Nothing has changed about our feelings
for one another, while the world around us
goes up in flames.
Drive your Subaru over the bridge into the
water, if that’s what you want. Carp leaping
into the air, looking for flies. But what
about the pelicans, their beaks pointed into the
sun?
—
Born in the Bronx, New York, Lewis Warsh attended the City College of New York, where he earned both his BA and MA in English. Warsh started writing poetry and fiction as a teenager and published his first poems in Wild Dog Magazine in 1965. A year later, Warsh co-founded Angel Hair magazine and books; he later joined a community of writers that formed around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village. Warsh authored over 20 books of poetry, as well as autobiographies and fiction. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Creative Artists Public Service Foundation, the Fund for Poetry and the Poet’s Foundation, Warsh also received an Editor’s Fellowship Award from the Coordinating Council on Literary Magazines, and a James Shestack award from the American Poetry Review; in 2005 he was the winner of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English. Warsh taught at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York as an associate professor in the English Department and directed the MFA program in creative writing. He died in late 2020 at the age of 76.
This poem appeared in Epiphany’s Fall 2015 Pent-Up Humanity issue.
