Tuesday, April 19, 2011

National Poetry Month - Day 19: Elisa Gabbert

Elisa Gabbert is the author of The French Exit (Birds, LLC, 2010) (the source of today's poem) and maintains a blog with the same title.

BLOGPOEM FOR APRIL

You can't invent a color, only name it,
like how I just named those contrails Benjamin
and then the sky behind them Benjamin II.
Now, retronymically, I refer to Ben as Ben I.
If he becomes famous, they'll stop calling
clouds "clouds" and call them "nonlinear
clouds" or "pre-Benjamin" for clarity.
I can think about fame all day, and
compose apologies for my friends' friends
who I've variously snubbed, write them
into emails with personalized P.S.'s:
P.S. My love for you extends forever
in all directions, or sometimes seems to.
P.S. I include a swatch of Yves Klein blue.
P.S. If the sky is a piano store and clouds
are baby grands, we just hang out in the back
and listen to a Casiotone's preprogrammeds.
P.S. This P.S. is my email's last will
and testament. It's leaving everything
to you. P.S. Like my love for you,
like the infinite crystalline watchface of
God of the sky, my email will never die.

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