Deep Cover Costumes
Surely the body is made
of stranger
things than politics
can steal:
the tangled
residue of stars,
the plastic
bag and orange
peels I kick past
the bridge,
flaming nerves splayed
across ancient and forgotten
avenues, the stomach-heavy goodbye
to others that always
feels a limit
on anyone’s remaining days
I see now
I really did
believe that the stories
of languages breaking
open the embedded
money source
were the victory
of changing grandeur
over the paltry measured
ties misnamed time—
I could never believe
that people meant the counting,
the stacking, the definitions
the dividing,
that those could be more
than misunderstanding
even when
burned in iron;
The world is simply not
anything any of us
say of it
our names are strange delusions
pulling us back
from a brink we are always
falling through—
it has no shape
no words
it is
not a brink
we are not
anyone there is
no falling
Copyright © 2017 Mark Wallace. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 28, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Deep Cover Costumes’ is part of my multipart long poem ‘The End of America,’ a work centered on the geographical and cultural conditions of southern California, where I’ve lived since 2005. I wrote the poem in spring 2017 when I, and maybe many other U.S. citizens, was questioning how the political life of my country had become what it had and what could be done about it. At the same time, I was wondering about the limits of my own understanding of the world and asking what parts of existence could not be accounted for by cultural and political conditions. The poem explores how cultural realities can become a cover for things we don’t understand and are maybe trying to avoid understanding, how insistence and certainty can become a way of ignoring the fact that much of what we claim as knowledge is really made of stories we’ve invented to protect ourselves from the vastness of the universe.”
—Mark Wallace
Mark Wallace
Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. His most recent poetry collection is the book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy (Altered Scale Press, 2014). He lives in San Diego.