Readings in Contemporary Poetry

Marjorie Welish


"HASN'T SHE A TICKET?"


Doesn't she appreciate a ticket?  POSSIBLE WORLDS ARE STIPULATED and

doublestruck, she, in duplicate on a short road.
			
                                               "I can't."

Islands without prior written consent
			
                                     envious of empty islands
				
                                                             in dimes that

consent to "NO" sonorously.
		
                                    When is a door not a door?
				
                                                             A door

to "NO" unmentions the latest scholarship, hinged to reduction

or contradiction. Or contradiction in droplets.


Nothing moves. Envy. "I can't." Isles of contraries
					
                                                             as envy

is to hope.

           Aestheticizing ethics as in marble

is lettering insofar as "HOPE" proffers "ENVY's" italicized "E" etcetera,

improving the other's "H" through doubling. Or by having doublestruck hope

enviously, or by envying hope's stasis, inscribing it notoriously, on the

breasts.

            Extremists in marble notarizing "HOPE," and "E" having been 

inscribed in pestilence to whisk across "H" in bed.

HAVING TAKEN THOUGHT UPON DEATH					

                                          plunges us

into non-contradiction exactly, more interestingly-paired incommensurate

antinomies creating beautiful truths, no?


Legendarily all-purposes: Bachelor Crossing. Liking hope and linking

it, a theological virtue, with a cardinal vice.
			
                                              "Rarely, if ever"

is flat. What do you mean: a good book?

copyright 1994



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