An Albany of Anything

Resist

poetry like this

at the ophthalmologist.

The soul’s window,

smirched by inner noses,

while descriptively exact,

won’t slow the diagnosis 

of your cataract,

but if what you had for view

was a barely twinkling Albany,

absurdly the capital of a state like this,

then surely one of us can be

the capital of giddiness,

having skipped the queue—

one suspects by sin—

to Sunday eggs Benedict Earth,

pre-apocalypse, post-margarine,

and as a human being,

an Albany of anything at all,

seeing, then forgetting, letting

the doctor dully style,

as if we hadn’t been aware,

the light beyond the smudges

of past selves’ noses, in file, the drudges

pressing the glass as if it were there.