I Am Impossibly Accidental
George Moore

I find myself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife
even as the music starts to drown out the baby’s cries
for its mother who has just recently taken a powder

to Paris, I think she said, and would be back just when
I’m dead. I can soothe the baby for awhile but what happens
at sixteen? Last thing I truly remember was waking up

with a tattoo on my right ring finger that was not a tattoo.
Then the career started like a wheel that some mad escaped
patients from a neighborhood institution for the terminally

giddy have released from the top of my personal hill
and I got caught up in the rush right after getting the degree
to find a spot that I might nest for awhile with as few

obstacles like classes and students as possible. Nothing
ever works the way it should, but often only the way
it was planned. That’s part of the problem. An accident

for one is only a nicely organized chess game for another.
I remember that Vivian made Eliot take out that line
in The Waste Land because she was afraid everyone would know

their life was like the chessmen, only an ivory relationship.
That was no accident. And it was in reading it again
I discovered the first hintings of this girl’s crazy mother.

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