SELF-PORTRAIT IN A SEA OF USELESS TEARS
I used to be a woman who cried
over the useless bastards.
Boo-hoo, I said, filling my hanky,
boo-hoo over the useless bastards.
It is too bad we can’t see ourselves
in our own silliness at the time,
but I was blind, a younger woman then,
engaging in what was called Love
and then the End Times and the filled
hankies and the salt water pooling
beneath my chin. Now I’m too old
for that nonsense. Too old, too fat;
the useless bastards have no use for me.
But then I’d walk miles to the coast
just to drown in salt water.
Boo-hoo, the gulls would cry,
mocking me. Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!
DIANE SEUSS‘s most recent book, Four-Legged Girl, is forthcoming in October 2015 from Graywolf Press. Her previous collection, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Her first book, It Blows You Hollow, was published by New Issues Poetry and Prose. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize and has been included in The Best American Poetry 2014. Seuss is Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College.
Read more by Diane Seuss:
Two poems in B O D Y
Poem in The Missouri Review
Poem in The Ampersand Review
Poem in Blackbird