Nero Wolfe's Last Case

NERO WOLFE’S LAST CASE


The thing I have to do
I don’t do now.
Intersect, is all.
The way a flower

(ich bin keine
Blume) catches
her attention even
when she doesn’t

like it, dyed
marigold or azure
mum, shame
on colors!

and the vascular
families the way
they also intersect,
Farbers and Blooms

all cherrypie and charity,
you call that an absolute?
Simple explanation helps:
the deed was dismal,

the day Thursday,
the donor doubtful,
the dinner grisly,
the doctor girlish,

the dog dead.
My plane even didn’t
land till Sabbath
when the organs

of the Christians swell
with unaccountable
presumption roaring
the complacency of calculus

(Bentham’s, felicific)
stuffed ballot boxes,
lobster roe.
I hate this town.

It was my car
but I let him drive.
Always south
around these parts,

the sun always
in my eyes, I left
my sleep on the plane,
sat alert and counted

cats and homeless men
till we reached the door.
O god that door, purple,
double-winged,

stained glass grapes
of Tuscany ditzy fanlight
over it I went in
and am here still.

I’m writing you
because I don’t believe
in letters but it’s nice
in the library

the smell of cigarettes
and leather, like a gay bar
without the sweat,
I put a pillow on the phone

and locked the door.
This is where the murder
is supposed to be.
(Good name for our planet.)

Since I’m alone I guess
I’m to be the victim.
Fair enough but already
I’m sweating (smelllessly)

wondering which book
has my number, or will
the big terrestrial globe
explode with mortal gas,

is it even seeping now,
are my lips blue? But you
never cared about my mouth
except for what it said.

All that language and no spit.
I have been here an hour
reading Plutarch’s Lives,
pretending to be thinking.

Snake in the drawer?
Poison polish on the Louis-Quinze?
The ceiling will collapse.
The floor gives way.

This ballpoint pen
my only weapon.
It seems to me this very room
I’ve lived in all my life,

these books my books,
these hands my hands,
just like Shakespeare
grey all afternoon and

the light is gone now.
Heron of Alexandria
made a room that thinks
for you, it tells you also

when it’s time to die.
Nero tested it on some meek
philosopher who spent
three months on a treatise:

Hunting Clouds with Caged Birds
then slit his wrists in the tub en suite.
Heron built a steam-driven
float for a carnival parade

that knew its own way
and led the multitudes along
who gladly followed
and still will do

any prosperous machine.
Heron baked a knife
inside a loaf of bread
that leapt out at you

when you passed a magnet by,
but whatever good was that?
I am done with science,
dying men have used up all their grace.

I am alone with what I’ve done
and thought and said
and thought I said, a quiet
brownstone mind mixed up with living.

The page in front of me
describes the pointless travels
of Cosmopleutes the Curious
till I know how little

I myself have lived.
Not even Madagascar
for Christ’s sake. So little
in fact I begin to suspect

I never got around to being born.
Fetus-fatuous I spent my days
mumbling heartfelt pronouns
that stood for no imaginable

nouns or names or you.
Out of the wall or bookcase
someone comes now
with skilful hand to murder the unborn.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005