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The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.1 (2004) 1-2


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A Poem

Gordon Lish

One Way of Looking at You-Know-What

Don't.
Do not.
What did I tell you?
Did I not tell you not to look?
Sly patch, little dickens.
Now you've gone and done it, haven't you?
Saw it humping from out behind the radiator.
Or was it taunted from beneath it?
Grumbling underneath it.
All the while, with shoulders—shoulders!
   a loitering.
Who forced?
What forced?
Crawling.
On matched crawlers.
Positively a mammal.
Indefeasibly a mammal.
Why did you sit yourself down?
Why are you not next door?
I wrote.
Dope.
You wrote.
All fucking show.
Looking to look [End Page 1]
that it be no other
save you looked at.
Seen looking.
Seen parlously.
Seen perilously.
Seen fatally
out in front of.
Instead of.
Ahead of the game.



Gordon Lish is a far-out novelist and short story writer. Read Dear Mr. Capote, Peru, My Romance, and Zimzum, which are among the most extraordinary of his extraordinary fictions. He was fiction editor at Esquire, an editor at Knopf, and the editor of two literary magazines, Genesis West and The Quarterly. He lives in New York City, thank God, and is not the author of this note. He receives all callers at 212-348-6443.

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