Poetry Corner Monday

Immortality

Sandra Beasley

Face it: I will never

appear on the flipside of a nickel,

or as a balloon floating down Fifth Avenue;

no one will give my name to a variety of rosebush,

or a way to throw fastballs, or a beetle

with four strange, silvery wings.

They say my spit's helixes will swim in the children

of my children but that's nothing more

than a simple whip graft, the way

a pear tree is bullied into fruit. My heart

is one yellow marble waiting in a swarm of yellow marbles,

waiting for someone to chalk lines of play, waiting

for the thumb of God. Inertia

is a poor man's immortality. Even

the ancient recipes have failed us now--

no more gilded eyelids or canonic jars, no more

baklava baking in the crypt

of my jaw. Call me

selfish, but who doesn't dream

of being both kites and wind, boat and ocean?

I want to be the ball and the bat and the mound

and the sweat and the grass. 

I want to be the vampire who drinks

a tall cool glass of me so he can live forever.