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ARM WRESTLING
WITH MONSIEUR MALLARMÉ
Le quatorze juillet , vers la fin du vingtième
siècle : in our red union suits, we face off
across the breakfast table. The tablecloth
is as blue as the blue he and his kind
called azur and subsequently used
to make cigarette packs; and the hands
we keep cupped, palm-down on the cloth –
our left hands, anciens combatants – are as white
as the white of porcelain and alabaster
and the ancient bleached wood
of funerary coffers that hold small
gnarled artifacts of blackened silver
whose functions, no doubt ritual,
have been forgotten, perhaps irredeemably.
Our right hands meanwhile are raised, poised
like the blades of Samurai swords, aimed
to chop and to miss, narrowly, whistling.
This is all a manner of speaking.
But if eyes could win tournaments, mine,
tangling with his, would hoist him clear
out of his seat and up through the roof – it too
the color of poetical cigarette packs –
dangling him like a doll over the curved
earth; and I would secure him there
in the bed-linen-clean stratosphere,
letting the filthy weather seethe
and jostle a hundred thousand measures below.
But all this he knows so well, as we lean in,
putting our weight against the hard ball
of air that keeps our palms and centuries apart,
his reputation lending him no advantage.
So my fingertips inch inwards, imperturbable,
exploratory even in this well-traveled
territory, until they meet his fingertips
and, entering the looking-glass, find once more
the skin of icy sweat that clothes his
skin; and then I shape, define, create
the contours of his eyes, his nose, his brow
and enter again the soft cave of his mouth
to touch the treasured syllables: azur .
   
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