Themes & Variations: Figures in a Landscape II
︎︎︎ Chris McCreary
︎ Nov 7, 2025
You’d cruise too
if your couth soothed the denuded rubes
who’re starkers along the colonnade,
glomming onto every mystagogue
manqué in case meretriciousness
only gets them so far, their postlapsarian
innuendo kenneled into gargled argot.
Vanity has its caverns,
its predilections
& peccadilloes, each eel flailing its pail
into your shoebox soggy with note cards,
nothing novel in the quiddities
amassed therein. Commune with me here,
then, in the long denouement. No more
fit checks, no more sophistries
or submission fees,
no more pardons
borrowed from sovereigns. We could be
quiet as possums, intimate as shins
barked on ottomans in the dark.
if your couth soothed the denuded rubes
who’re starkers along the colonnade,
glomming onto every mystagogue
manqué in case meretriciousness
only gets them so far, their postlapsarian
innuendo kenneled into gargled argot.
Vanity has its caverns,
its predilections
& peccadilloes, each eel flailing its pail
into your shoebox soggy with note cards,
nothing novel in the quiddities
amassed therein. Commune with me here,
then, in the long denouement. No more
fit checks, no more sophistries
or submission fees,
no more pardons
borrowed from sovereigns. We could be
quiet as possums, intimate as shins
barked on ottomans in the dark.
Chris McCreary's latest book of poems, awry, was published by White Stag in 2024. He lives in South Philadelphia.