Tom Daley
Dear Citizen Curveclaw: The U.S. Ruling Class Has a Word with the President
after David Broderick
We are not concerned
with appearances, only the soft
landing of our prerogatives,
a clockwork built
from perspiring rockets.
We recognize why you sling,
O skittery tweaker, your murky
rumors, squealed by our satieties
and hemmed in by the pinch
of our fallen arches.
For eons, you’ve kept the gas
pockets venting through their angry shale,
denting our sense of tradition,
bleaching out our linen proprieties.
Citizen Curveclaw, amiable mouse—
you who never forgot what we excluded
when we craved to keep our precincts cooled,
you were our browbeat, our drill-bit nibbler.
But after you switched from bluster-winged
to turnkey and scatted impertinent sawteeth,
after you peeled open the derivative cheese wheels
(the ones with that furtively happy stink),
there wasn’t time to set you back to leanness,
to parse your midnight incantations,
to expect you to shake your pockets to sleep.
And all that bravura whisker
that keeps you clickering on the roofridge
before sunrise in any earthly time zone—
it spoke to us of legion, of a furry proliferation.
And if we set our calicoes against you,
don’t chew down the wainscot, don’t nibble
our fingerprints into your legacy’s larder.
Don’t convoke your cousins
who’ve been skittering the haycribs.
There’ll be time to spring the mousetrap
if you’ll only lose the cheese.
Tom Daley is the author of House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Hacks: Ten Years on Grub Street (Random House, 2007); Poets for Haiti (Yileen Press, 2010); The Body Electric (CreateSpace, 2013); and Luminous Echoes (Into the Void, 2017). He leads writing workshops in the Boston area and online for poets and writers working in creative prose.
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