Negative Capability Press Poetry Blog

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Upon Re-Reading Giovanni's Room

"People are too various to be treated so lightly,
and I am too various to be trusted," David says
as Baldwin would have him to, while drinking,
while he is staring through his own reflection
framed by the night's window pane, of a small
rented room, on a poor side of Paris.

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He seems fraught as a palsied peony
stricken by fall's first frost. He ambles

without missing his mark. I have been him,
though not for those very same reasons
that resign him to such a stoic resolve.
What reasons have to do with sorrow,
to one whose world is thwarted, diminished
until he is seriously out of sorts, so much,

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that even when he is speaking to himself
he ends his own statements with retorts?