Tobias Griffin

Most people find the Jehovah’s Witness to be
at best a nuisance, at worst a plague. I don’t.
When I am sick, they come to my door and see
how I am doing, and when I invite
them to come in, they always refuse, but nicely.
Seeing I am bored, they give me pamphlets
to read about the coming end of days.
I don’t care much about what one or the other says;

my eye is drawn to the lurid illustrations
depicting a post-apocalyptic world.
It is populated only by nuclear families
having picnics on checkered cloths spread
on green grass beneath cartoonish trees
while abstract bluebirds flutter overhead.
The scene’s cartoonish ugliness seems to me
paradisiac in its lack of complexity.

Robert Browning’s greatest poem was not
“My Last Duchess”
or “The Ring and the Book”
or “How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent”
but rather that moment when,
while recording that poem onto one of Thomas Edison’s first phonograph cylinders,
he breaks off from his staticky monologue and says

Robert Browning

ROOOOO—BERRRT BROOOOOW—NING

hip hip

HOORAY!

hip hip

HOORAY!

hip hip

HOORAY!

BROWNING!

When a hot bit of my wardrobe comes back from the laundry
and, through my own inevitable clumsiness, it falls upon the floor like a lax-backed
angel, allowing
explosions of a dozen different pants, boxers, and shirts,
(hanging them up in the bathroom while I shower will not remove their wrinkles, I just
know it!)
it is a cornucopia spread from my cracked plastic basket onto the oriental rug, which
is a similar
outpouring from a fertile culture (or at least a cheap facsimile of one).
Clothes are fruits! socks are ears of corn! And the gourds, squash and leafy fronds
roll out insouciantly onto the mat
where I had planned to meditate before going to bed. I think instead of a faceless stone-
relief king
holding a cornucopia, still firing missile-fruit into the eyes of those
squinting so hard that tourism becomes an opportunity to practice Zen.

But what are my socks doing in the Louvre anyway, rolling down its tableaux-haunted
hallways like a skee-ball with no hole to call its home?