NARCISSUS AT THE PHARMACY
Now that I am sick,
I have become
so important
to myself.
My reflection in every
surface, no matter
how marbled or matte.
My story swelling
like a Magic Eye
in every page I read.
The world is ending, yes,
but am I not a world?
A country, at least, to the
lives that live within me—
the bodies and antibodies.
Custodians and usurpers.
And like a tyrant
bedbound with gout,
I have been waking
in the witching hour,
obsessing over legacy
and who will inherit
my debts and vendettas.
Ach, the moon is such
a lousy prescription.
Such a queasy pill.
And the river is such
an inattentive orderly.
This soil has such a
bitter bedside manner.
So unsteady a hand to hold.
Atop this crematory heap
of suffocating supplicants,
as the hot ash finds
the last of the Minoans,
scuttled in fields of saffron,
I beg and I weep and I rage:
But what about me?
Beautiful me?
What will become,
after all, of me?
This poem was originally published in the Fall 2020 Issue of Beloit Poetry Journal.