"A Corsage" by David Schubert

Feeling like “a very village of sorrow,”
Just like Franz Schubert, with each sad bourgeois
Dolorously doleful, I only said
When you asked me for my life-story,
“Well, the world is a funny place, un
pleasant things can happen.”

I chewed
the silence, cryptic and stupidly.
I felt diminished by myself, much like
the passport photographs that make you look
like an escaped convict or
the victim of circumstances.

I
am the oyster shell, after the
succulent seaworm’s been devoured,
with only the pretense of sea in your cupped
ear.

The next day you wore a
corsage of pansies.
exultantly alive, serious scholars
of melancholy, brave and lionhearted
with thoughtful thoughts.

Now
in this well of eyes before me, icy eyes,
now in the Broadway 7th Avenue Van Cortlandt
subway, feeling quite walled in, Henry
David Thoreau breaks the ice, says
“Time is the stream I go a
Fishing in—what about
You?”

I, Henry, will study
these pansies, profoundest
professors of the world’s woes.