Jack Conway

FURNITURE MAKES ME CRY

Furniture makes me cry. I don't know why. It's not
like my snug chair by the window has a memory
of the good times we shared. Or that my bed bears
in mind how we lied on it. Or lay there sick. Sadly,
a cough is the only articulate response to the celestial
question: Should we begin alterations? Altercations
don't seem appropriate anymore. Ah, the August moon
accosts our august plans for urbane renewal. The fabric
of all shadows bestows its faithful grief on our enterprise.
We are interior decorators of our own intelligent design.
Let the thing be pressed the great man said. All the detail
can be ironed out after my appointment with my assassin.
We all want to get to the top without getting to the bottom
of things. It's not like I hold a grudge against the full-length
mirror that no longer reflects my juvenile imagining. We
come and go not so much like Michelangelo but Miro. In a
small train station at night I see the seated woman. Don't ask
me to love you anymore than I already do. That would be unfair.
But now let us get back to this discussion of my chair.

Jack Conway’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Columbia Review, Rattle, Yankee, The Potomac and The Norton Anthology of Light Verse among others. He is the author of, My Picnic With Lolita and Other Poems published by North Country Press in 2004. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth and Bristol Community College in Fall River.