Poems by Adam Scheffler

Antarctica

by Adam Scheffler

From Canary Fall 2018

Adam lives near Massachusetts Bay, a half mile north of the Charles River.

People don’t think about me,
or if they do it’s as a vague cold
waste, the cuteness of penguins,
or territorial disputes, how even
deep in the frozen tundra, politics
carves me up like a pizza pie
sliced by Norwegians into
a checkerboard, so everyone can fight
over the middle slice with
its crustlessness and its field of
perfect cheese. But it turns out
I have a secret identity. It turns out
for millions of years I’ve been
clutching to the vast refrigerator
of my chest so much ice that melting
it will drown both Hong Kong
and New York on a date that sounds
futuristic, but isn’t. Which is
why Germany is now suddenly
the least despicable nation, vacuuming
grass & recycling footsteps, the
whole country amok with bad hairdos
from wind turbines, as America keeps
saying happy birthday to itself and
failing to blow out its rivers. Look,
I wouldn’t tell you any of this,
I’d be happy to lie low, go on being
tickled by Argentina, looking huge on
Mercator maps, and being the single
continent without a murder-suicide,
except that I’m losing my grip.
So I want to cluster you together like
penguins keeping warm, or high school
football players getting a pep talk
from Coach, to say it’s time to have
a TV channel devoted to earthworms,
a Macy’s Day Parade for eels – it’s time
to reevaluate, to worship everything
that’s been keeping you alive.

© Adam Scheffler

Sexy Time

by Adam Scheffler

From Canary Spring 2019

Listen, I don’t need the 16 headed
hive-vision of CNN to know that
death is under the tablecloth –

or that it’s driving the human beings
to invent delicious poisons and slap
each other like puppets.

Today the newspaper just told me two
black holes merged “resulting in a pit
of infinitely deep darkness
weighing as much as 49 suns”

as if that were comprehensible,
as if exhausted, each thought bulldozed
by the nightshift, we hadn’t dug that pit ourselves –

but I love how we say fuck like bunnies,
how innocent dopey fluffballs
are better at sex than we are;
I love the unknowable weirdness
of aardvark’s lust for each other.

Look, I too sometimes feel like chirpy
circus music that’s been playing
a long time after the dopey jack
has sprung from his box, bobbing
his head horribly on his rusty string,

but sometimes your Catholic friend
tells you sex is really only ‘bestial rutting’
and you smile at him and say
“only if you’re doing it right.”