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      February 16, 2012Single Man’s SongJacob Scheier

      after Al Purdy

      After he makes love to himself
      the not quite middle aged single man
      listens to his sigh
      sail to the end of the room
       
      With pants around his ankles
      and wearing a grey wool sweater
      she called his rat suit
      he peers at his cock’s sad pug head
      and returns to the Kraft Dinner
      he has been eating with a ladle
      astonished and a little frightened
      by his immense freedom
       
      He pulls up his pants
      and walks out the door in his rat’s royal robes
      taking glee in his ignorance
      of not knowing the precise nature
      of his fashion crime
      only surely he has committed one
      if not several and is free
      to get away with them
       
      As he clashes down Queen Street
      the oak leaves applaud him
      and laugh at his jokes
      I am myself again
      he sings into the wind
       
      Not that she would have stopped him
      from wearing that sweater of course
      only told him the truth—
      that he looked bad
      freedom it now occurs to him
      is no one caring
      what you look like
       
      At home he imagines someone watches him
      for imagining otherwise is unbearable
      he cannot call this witness god
      instead thinks of himself as being on a TV show
      though maybe a TV show watched by god
      where he is a lovable sort of man
      for wearing such an ugly sweater
      but knows now its magic was contained
      in her dislike for it
      in the way she gave so much thought
      to what he did
      and sometimes hated what he did
      and loved him never any less for it
       
      And while only the day before
      he took relief in draping his sweater
      over the sofa arm
      and flinging his underwear
      to the four corners of the earth
      he now hangs his rat suit carefully in the closet
      and the scratching of the hanger’s wire stem
      sliding along the aluminum
      is a chime bringing him to a moist day in April
      that felt like November
      when despite her protests
      he bought the sweater
      for the change in his pocket
       
      He only said then that he liked it
      not that he pictured clear as the day before him
      a widow in a time of war
      knitting the sweater’s basket weave
      in a cabin where a doe slows by the window
      and stretches her small mouth to a birdfeeder
      half full of rain
      and her slender legs are momentary sundials
      but all of this goes unseen
      by the woman
      as she draws the needles together
      and now pulls them apart
      in a time and place
      when what mattered most
      was staying warm

      from #35 - Summer 2011

      Jacob Scheier

      “I wrote this poem in response to a rather canonical Canadian poem, entitled ‘Married Man’s Song’ by Al Purdy. Purdy (may he rest in peace) is somewhat of an icon in Canadian letters, though was barely noticed in the U.S. (except by his friend, Charles Bukowski). ‘Married Man’s Song,’ by way of summary, is a sort of argument in favor of infidelity (though not without irony). I wanted to complicate the romanticism of this poem with a rather unromantic depiction of single life—to which I had, at the time I wrote ‘Single Man’s Song,’ recently chosen for myself based on rather romantic notions somewhat along the lines of Purdy, as well as Shelley and a host of other unhappy, however ‘free,’ poets.”

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