Hudson Plumb
Seymour’s Fat Lady in New York
“There isn't anyone anywhere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that?”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
I bet she looked like you
her veiny legs bulging like Popeye's arms
her feet overflowing her shoes like pudding
but you have no shoes
just plastic bags wrapped around a sock
and a shopping cart full of aluminum cans
manic monologuer
you dance the rhumba on Fifth Avenue
pillage green garbage bags at night
outside Park Avenue awnings
afternoons you splay out like an inverse Y
on the sidewalk
sucking Thunderbird
or stuffing a Danish
I see you camped out in a concrete cul-de-sac
watching a television wired
to the corner lamp
the balding executives walk by
and admire your full head of hair
you notice a sound
but then suddenly present—
or an infant’s cry,
and elsewhere the sensation of breathing,
expanding and contracting,
like Plato’s cave people
and thinking they were everything,
splashed black on a wall—
special names, special stories
and how they acquired names,
and what they meant,
quietly comforting,
except for the nagging thought
about something hidden,
something buried in the mind,
something not really there at all
you notice a movie
of your eyelids
a screen that is dark, but not fully dark—
you watch your thoughts pass like clouds,
some of them gathering,
until all at once
from the beginning—
in the sky of the mind
in the sky of the mind
in the sky of the mind
as if it were prior
the distant report of a car alarm,
or a thin, ringing whine in one ear,
the tingling of tissues moving,
as you experience them but can’t be sure,
watching shadows on a wall
everything—the entire universe
and giving the shadows names,
about the histories of the shadows
and where they came from,
and finding those stories
quietly mesmerizing,
that appears in the mind
something imagined,
something not on the wall,
in the sky of the mind
projecting against the curtain
against the shimmering darkness—
and against this screen
some of them darkening,
some of them circling,
you begin again—
in the sky of the mind,