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Endless Topic

There’s no one in this poem.
That’s the wine talking. That’s the
phlox in the field undressing
the fescue with purple clusters. I love what’s beneath you.
And the office carpet

has a carpet I love to cover it.
It feels better without not hurting,
like a fart brings your beauty to life
galloping around the field with branch antlers.
She loved him enough to make him marry

Mary, he her enough not to do it.
Between her legs he tasted iron.
There’s no one in this poem to touch your penis
or listen to your clitoris. The water rises
around the debt of the body. There’s no body

left to serve the sentence, the icon of the state
long since become a face,
in an antique skirt, no underwear
on the driest hundred acres. A bandana
on my face and the sun on your

equality, to live in the field where a stick has fallen,
I just wanted to hear your voice,
not letting it be touched, or in this
that came toward you but never crossed that mystic border.
Then something did happen.

—Richard Meier

Richard Meier is the author of Terrain Vague and the forthcoming Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar.

Originally published in the November/December 2005 issue of Boston Review



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