DRAFT OF A PREFACE #1

Note for a Maceronicon and Panopoeia (troubadour cooped) ensconced at still antique Manhatta: but swing not that brittle basket now. Be the first on your social register and hurry to sign up for the spring term’s course on free verse interludes in the Modern Age administered by the guy at the delicatessen who wears his checkered scarf so snug. (Or a multi-fractured portrait of your traveling ad-copy man’s exuberant voices gone; daft like our yes man after much travailing.) We sell attractive, distinctive, colorful, washable displays in process oil. Show cards, price cards, glass, metal, cloth, wood, card board, and paper signs. Motion displays, felt pennants, lamp shades, bakelite signs, real estate signs, decorative novelties, tire cover printing, fabric novelties, and all flat surfaces regardless of thickness. We toil. We never nod to anxiety. We filter the silt. We are Alaska dogs on undershirts—not funny. We are small men in skullcaps even when we are women. Note for a preface: endgames are optional. How hangs the lonely man’s axe? High. We infuse the bones with ink and drain until tender. We are half again how much we weighed upon departure, in the parlance of cheese manufacturers universified. Note for a holy preface: we are a serious set of canoodlers for you. Note for a preface: from the mixed-up desk of a traveling plumbing salesman’s unimaginable daydreamt wanderlusts (mainly from within the amygdale, that almond-shaped mass of mediocre matter in each hemisphere of the brain which governs feelings of aggression). Note for a preface: no extreme kerning, no more widowed lines. We widen our nervous-making stride for the stretch (abundance all at once). As for the foul besmirching, we build around young gloves and spike speed and simply kill him quick! How turns this racer’s inside wheel? Wide. Note toward a preface: no apologies for snapshots of actual play in the sharp and darting scrimmage, halfback flaneur running behind a lunching mid-fielder’s idle interference, blocking off, blocking off and the team preparing again in their long wishbone. Please play the following games: Steeplechase, Yacht Race, Fish Pond, Sugar Mottoes, Trimmed Millinery, Large Size Milk Wagon. Note for a preface (a walking rain of nationwide phrases): All of these and more!

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SCOTT ZIEHER’s first book of poetry, VIRGA, was published by Emergency Press in 2005. The selection published here consists of the preface from IMPATIENCE, the second installment of a proposed thirteen-volume, single-poem sequence. He is co-owner of ZieherSmith, a contemporary art gallery in New York City, where he has lived since 1992. He was born and raised in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

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