'Tis News As Null As Nothing*

by Edward Mayes

We know it would please us to stop with

The surceases, if they could ever really

Stop, such as the day we took away

The spittoons but left the jungle gym,

Healthy, wealthy et cetera, as if our life

Had the ability to be an excerpt from

A larger life, so be it, or someone we all

Used to know, and never to kowtow to,

Or, for that matter, besmirch, nor

Sitting in the park eating donuts, of all

Things, eatable every bit of the way,

But roadblocks will be roadblocks,

The screen doors slapping our faces

Unapologetically, we’re still unsure whether

We received the last telegram or whether

We sent it, no one knows why we typed

Petty larceny when we could have just as

Well typed grand, when fingers are the body’s

Filaments, and in all the beds narcissi are

Narcissussing, or which would we rather take,

The gravy boat or the gravy train, our bags

Stuffed with all the graven images we can carry,

When we said nothing enough times that it

Turned into something, although we are not

Now nor will ever be force-fed, because

We chose apricots and will always choose

Apricots, light hastening over their smooth

Skin, don’t give me that newsier than thou

Look, the foolish among us have already

By now run into oncoming traffic,

Burdening us with their sad tidings, equilibrium

No longer being the horror we once

Thought it was, when we only used

The obit pages to line the parrot’s cage,

Until the parrot itself finally put a stop to

It, stop it, it said, stop it, stop it, and we did.

*The title is a line from poem 1049, “Myself can read the Telegram,” The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by R. W. Franklin

Edward Mayes’s books of poetry include First Language, To Remain, Magnetism, Works and Days, Speed of Life, and Bodysong. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Poetry. His books have received the Juniper Prize, the Gesù Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award, and the Associated Writing Programs Prize. He’s also received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He lives in North Carolina and Cortona, Italy, with his wife, writer Frances Mayes.