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.

 
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