Peter J. Shippy: Three Poems

The Great Wall of Wabash | The Protocols
of Attending the Danish Opera | Aggressive Ships

The Great Wall of Wabash

Even with a small army of animators
at my disposal I’m unsure how car bombs fit
into my weight loss plan. The pitch corrector
is clearly out of order this morning—
I’m off-key, my curveball is flat, and my sit-com
tenders received a red light. Doctor Tanguy
believes that all my woes began in the egg
foo yung I ate as a boy: Beansprouts cause
cow loss and gigantism! Who knew? I thought
my blather was caused by my family—
a company of puppets equipped with gears
to change their facial expressions. I finish
my granola just in time to hear my bell toll.
I pull down the periscope and see scads
scabbing the union picket lines. Time to boil
the oil. Time to catapult the plague-rats.
Time to hook my daily bread. As Doctor Koch
(sounds like knuckle sandwich) always says:
you are as you are because if you were
I would not exist to say: you are as you are
because if you were I would not exist
to say…. After I finish transforming
my consciousness it’s time to eat fish-sticks.
I toss the little packets of tartar sauce
at the Mongols climbing the wall creepers.
The sun is cheerful. The air is hygienic
to the eye. Woodpeckers are making short work
of our last elm tree. Their music reminds me
of mother, working her jaw, blinking one lid:
Yes? No? Raise the floorboards and feed your uncles?
It’s time to loosen my cummerbund. I phone
Doctor Gorky. It’s time to foreshadow.

The Protocols of Attending the Danish Opera

So Act One finished with Coleridge lashed to the mizzenmast
like Kirk Douglas in Ulisse or Milo O’Shea in Ulysses

or Keir Dullea in 2001 or, obviously, like a gawky teenage
Shirley Temple as the albatross in Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

At intermission, a polygraph machine was rolled on stage.
A volunteer was selected from the season ticket holders.

This is when I remembered that I promised to have a word
or two about the cerebral cortex? Shall we? You see

scanning electron microscopes have proven, without a doubt
that the meter of the Eddic poems causes the cerebral hemispheres

to become kempt, gruntled, couth, astrous and grayer, more wrinkly.
The versed brain looks like a storm cloud ready to deliver

a lake-effect soliloquy and it’s as furrowed as a tulip trench
dug by fusty blade. You see? It turned out that our man

from the expansive box was an inveterate fibber. But we felt
bighearted, after all we were attending the Danish opera, drunk

on Eddic beats, so we pushed our levers to hurl that patron
into Act Two, where — like us, in this — he felt eyeballed but

lonesome, alone, like John Barrymore in Tempest or Walter Pidgeon
as Dr. Mobius or Robby the Robot as a tin Caliban.

Close your sweet eyes, and let the à la notes à go-go your soul.

Aggressive Ships

White aches; ash masts assuage the harbor
Water, peeling bark, a whirling in the nets:
Fetch the sheaves, Jonah! From my office
In the old Custom House I can see a parade
Transporting a saint or a figurehead
Through Salem Common. It takes nine months
To eat one, from little piggies to fontanel.
My computer throws spreadsheets against
The buttery plaster. The telephone blows.
Since mother couldn’t swim she couldn’t tell
The surf from the sheep. Gray gulls collect
On my sill, waiting for the cast-offs.

Poet's Biography:

Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves’ Latin (UIowa Press). He has new work appearing in The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review and The Colorado Review. His eBook Alphaville is available from BlazeVOX Books. Links to his poems can be found at http://www.peterjayshippy.com.