January 22, 2009

MY NIGHT WITH GEORGE COSTANZA


          Little lamb, who made thee?
          Dost thou know who made thee?
          —William Blake


Another blue stretch
in the Black Eye Galaxy—

it might have been
if groggy lamblets one, two, three

were not spilling out
into the secret world I share

with George Costanza;
George and I are met upon a klieg-lit plain

and I have on my Little Bo Peep costume
while George leans on his shepherd’s crook

and lambs as soft as heaps of sugar-dust
as light as new spring snow

are romping in the heavenly bright
till all I know

all that I ever need to know
is herding lambs with George Costanza.

          ~

George Costanza’s lambs
are plump as macaroons

and mine, as whorls
of white meringue.

Let those who never
gamboled with a lamb

suck on sweet bones,
make wicked plans;

I’m off now
herding lambs

with George Costanza.

          ~


Word to the cynics, you who laugh
so sure no codswallop with lambs

could ever make you weep;
that George Costanza’s nothing

but a sham, and I perhaps a wolf
sent out among the sheep

to shear their souls: but I say No,
and I am half-asleep, with all

the strange authority conferred
on sleepers. So you believe

that it is good and meet we met
and flew our stuttering craft

out of the Black Eye Galaxy
into a universe so daft

that you and I and all
the syncopating lambs

are one, are one at last!
With George Costanza.

—Rachel Loden
____
forthcoming in Dick of the Dead (Ahsahta Press)

Posted by dwaber at January 22, 2009 01:33 PM