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  • Personal Poem, and: Pistachio Tree at Chateau Noir
  • Paul Legault (bio)

Personal Poem

Now when I get personal I have only one thing to say (a dead gay once told me, and meant it) when I was here it was beautiful how it brought me too much to my knees. Help keep us funny in the good way, but now we’re fine being just a little off.

I walk through the new world in street view passing the houses that look like they’re here, and it’s fine, cause what’s not the left thing that I ever wanted to keep is also what I’d like—to have a home with you and get older partially. LeRoi Jones turned into this shaking force the last time he had to. Isn’t Amiri a beautiful name and say yours twenty times before we call you by another one, Daisy. What disease is the new breast cancer? Don’t not look at me like that. We go out to eat a lot in cool but crowded restaurants we decide to like as much as that Henry James novel in which the people we don’t want to be are from San Francisco maybe, or, no, New York and walk on into a deathless beauty. I wonder if Wonder is always on the internet thinking of its distant uncles and buying out itself out of nothing back when now is still the future. [End Page 198]

Pistachio Tree at Chateau Noir

Beaucoup de musique de Miley on the air—As one may imagine, there is a Rihanna button, and it is what you push when you enter the control room, and yet, wait, forgot which nearby star we’re headed to. Your “my most dangerous thing about me” is: I’m the Sun, bitch. Of all the dead, Cézanne is saddest he can never paint you on a hill of rabbit furs, naked except for your crystal axe, glinting, as seen from above. My love is in the movies, if you count Vine as that. Everyone bought shares of Facebook who could and shared it on Facebook, but no one wants to go gambling with me, but that makes sense.

And like the gray filter of that Pretty Little Liars spin-off, like so many sets for Netflix’s future operas, our homes are spacious 3-D haunts that don’t look real with us in them in hats or on loveseats, until things get dirty. The panorama shot you took is really cute except I’m naked in it. Nan Goldin never hid her folders. Why should

where you put things ever be invisible? Wonder-pilot, slow down and circle us around over Vegas in your finest transparent jet. It’s ’cause of your smile we can’t stop—and won’t. That’s what the spring is all about. That and flowers/time. Where do you go in the old world—when you feel new, and they tell you to join the (ruins of a) circus, and mean this busy, open space, where a number of roads meet? [End Page 199]

Paul Legault

Paul Legault is the author of three books of poetry: The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011), and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, 2012). He is a writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

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