It Has Been So Long Since I Last Saw a Tiger & Other Poems
By Ace Boggess
It Has Been So Long Since I Last Saw a Tiger
Babies born that day have passed through puberty
to the age of angst, wearing black, cutting,
purging, doubting meaning & survival.
I was innocent then, romantic,
watching caged ferocity as though prisons don’t exist for all
The Siberian white received its meal like a sacrifice,
tore into oxtail with sapling’s snap in a windstorm.
Naïve of me to think the animal serene
when each day it imagined a fresh kill
after strolling in the long grass of freedom.
Infants that day would not have seen menace
behind its weary yawn. There is always suffering,
struggle. I wonder if the tiger lives, &
if I went back, & if our eyes met,
which one of us would see a different beast?
The Expression on Her Face Is Finally Right
after many mistakes, misgivings, shortcomings,
too-human hang-ups—a glow that can’t be
approximated, smile not the fake smile
of so-so, sure, whatever. she looks
as though she climaxed with a stranger
& doesn’t believe it, & hasn’t come to regret it.
how many gifts has she meekly oh-myed
without the release of happiness?
slight silver chain resting
on the leaf of her palm like a swallowtail,
thing so fragile as to be shattered by a breath,
finds her breathless. what does one ever desire
that won’t turn out a hoax
played by self tricking self?
our spaces fill with disappointments—
hers more than customary or convenient,
mine set aside. I would do this always
for exclusive seconds rarer than silver,
more difficult to grasp in an open hand.
“Can I Find Myself Less Annoying?”
[question asked by Miriam Sagan]
After a conversation, I measure
every word I spoke, each gesture,
how my nonexistent eyebrows
lifted, forming fleshy triangles
of surprise, amusement, scorn
I was never very good at this
being-a-human-being thing.
Fear first. Doubt follows
with endless obsessing.
Did that last joke go too far?
Of course it did. Why couldn’t I lie
when a kind word might silence
some deep bellow of blues?
All exists between charm & rudeness:
null set, self-fulfilling humiliation.
I wanted to be one of you,
but I’m still sitting in a corner,
wearing my rebel suit of disappointment.
Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry—Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled—as well the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, The Laurel Review, River Styx, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.