A Little Ode to Television
Alan Feldman
| poetry
After the disorder of my days, and in the defeat of my evenings,
I love the quiet, revocable suicide of television,
especially British detective shows, where everyone
is driving cooperatively on the left, but the devoted detective
has broken many rules, and her superior officer
is inevitably impeding the plodding investigation,
while everyone speaks according to region and social class
and the rain tumbles down from the heavy
upholstery of the British sky.
I’m comforted knowing that the improbable murderer
will end up behind bars, or will die being captured, while the
detective,
quietly vindicated, will return to her paperwork and her
loneliness,
not unlike mine, isolated inside the rain-drenched black
umbrella
of her nights. And I feel safe knowing a hundred more
episodes are waiting,
each as fateful as the sunset, and shaped by the same
conventions
of order and mayhem. And I must never forget
to sing the praises of the music too––the royal
French horns, and the screeching violins of terror
at the spilling of British blood––and how all of it leads
perfectly into sleep.
Alan Feldman is the author of The Happy Genius, which won the annual Elliston Book Award for the best collection by a small, independent press in the United States; A Sail to Great Island, which won the Pollak Prize for Poetry, and Immortality, which won the Four Lakes Prize and is due out from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2015. His chapbook, Flowers in Wartime, has just been published as a fundraiser for children’s classes at Danforth/Art. Find more at http://alanfeldmanpoetry.com/