Clothes (Very Short Essays 02)

CLOTHES by Roberta Morris

I've lost my stomach
for naked emperors:
the big men
with the long titles,
the big words
in the long sentences,
the lack
(complete)
of content.
And the listeners,
commenting on the leaves,
or worse, the spider webs,
never the forest,
not even the trees.
They are too polite
(too craven?
too self-absorbed?)
to say,
"That Versace is invisible;
that Armani is imaginary."

(These thoughts
on the academic life
can be generalized.)

***

This is the first serious poem I wrote after high school.  The year was 1998.  I had attended a talk at the University of Michigan Law School where I was an adjunct.  I won't say who spoke or what the topic was but the talk bothered me. The first line of this poem popped into my head and then I wrote the rest.  In the spring of 1999, Current Magazine, an Ann Arbor weekly, announced its first annual Poetry and Fiction Contest.  I entered my one poem and won an Honorable Mention.  I admit that this encouraged me.

Since then I have written a few poems a year.  Another poem, Crocuses, won an Honorable Mention in a later Current Magazine contest, one that The Way Back Machine captured.  I posted another of my poems, Merit Needs a Publicist, on this blog early on and may post more as part of the Very Short Essays series.

RJM 7/20/2013