Wallace Stevens
Wazzup?
With the widows and the maidens?
The name
dropping
the distancing vocabulary that
we scurry to look up
look up
train our eyes
train.
If I came into your office, in downtown
Hartford a city
I knew framed - as my father grew up in
Wethersfield always said
be careful –
downtown Hartford is
not a good place to be alone.
So I saunter, prink, and
perambulate
plonk myself
past your receptionist.
A widow?
And she’d holler:
-Mr. Wallace I asked her to stop!
And your desk which you requested almost 15 years ago
already looks out of date in too heavy oak is
caught between us, a horizontal surface filled
with paper.
There will be one sentence.
And one exclamatory remark.
-Wallace, you’re only human -  you put your pants on
one leg at a time.
-No!
he says, jumping up from his desk,
-Watch!
He undoes his belt, he drops his trousers
he steps out of them –
He steps out one leg at a time.
BUT
Wallace Stevens, god bless him,
arranges his pants carefully on the floor of the
Hartford Accident
and
Indemnity Company
just so.
And grinning,
hops into both puddled legs
at the same time.
Then bends over and hoists the waistband
the belt dangling
in triumph.
Lesson learned.
Learned, schooled like
St. Ursule with her radishes
Just another lady
Just another confabulist
Just another story.