Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present by Great American Prose Poems- From Poe to the Present (mobi)

Author:Great American Prose Poems- From Poe to the Present (mobi)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2008-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

B.J. ATWOOD-FUKUDA (1946–)

The Wreck of the Platonic

The guy at the next table reminded her of her first serious boyfriend, but even as the word serious surfaced to the chattery part of her brain that was already watching someone hear her tell the story long since gone barnacle-encrusted as myth, already hearing her own voice run it out like Morse code on the quiet of a moonless, star-splattered sky, she realized as if pronouncing it for the very first time what a euphemism serious was, I mean it might have served some purpose in the early sixties when anyone would have understood that it meant the first boy she’d fucked, not loved, since in those days girls rarely fucked their first loves, assuming that girls back then loved for the first time at thirteen or fourteen the way they do now only more intensely, if anything, since girls back then not only didn’t assume that the relationship, which they didn’t call it, if any, would be consummated but, if they’d been raised in those days of the double standard to be, well, nice, they were mostly scared silly of the very idea notwithstanding the depth of their craving, the intensity of their fascination with the throbbing flesh for which it, mere ‘very idea’ in the starch voices of a million middle-class white moms, was but a limp stand-in, a shriveled shill, a most unreasonable, wimpy facsimile thereof. So they built the ship Platonic to warn us not to screw; what it had to do with Plato, we didn’t have a clue. Poor Plato, alas, lamented the incapacity of chairs to approach the ideal of chairness; no chair, however hard it might try, could ever achieve in his eyes the beauty of that naked, unmediated state. Poor Plato, obsessed with chairs. No wonder she and her girlfriends had wondered why abstinence was called Platonic or, more precisely, why it meant not-fucking, since if they’d run into the word at all it would have been somebody’s uncle in AA, and who ever talked about that back then; and finally, when they got to philosophy in school, how the hell Platonic got conjured from Plato, a man who had once lived and breathed and jerked himself off, they supposed, against the backs of chairs in various states of imperfection—rocky, rickety, rocking—the doctor in the deep blue sea only knew. Poor Plato, lured off his true and proper course, fetched up on a floating slagheap of sophistry, hoisted on a pinnacle of pieties arch and brittle as ice. O they built the ship Platonic to warn us not to screw, and they thought we’d get on board and enjoy the frigid view. Were they wrong. Young girls and boys saw right through their parents’ ploys, husbands and wives had to reassess their lives. Was it sad? no doubt, o so sad, she thought as she eyed the guy at the next table over and watched that clone of her first serious boyfriend lean back in

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