Meredith Davidson: "Some Man's Folly"

Some Man's Folly

Somewhere between the teeth
grinding & the lines snorted in the
bathroom to foil the cries of drunk
girls mishued & the full on
constriction of the dichotomous –
we would like to rename the Prime Meridian.
And the land mass and the
conceptual “space” and the spin of a
CD worth thirteen dollars and fifty-two cents
we sought to speak sense 
with all the sensibilities of all the east
of Eden, but all the idealism too.
But the speech was blinding in its
wax but in its wane.
 
I marvel at the cycles.
The thresholds to repeatedly cross to
expect anything but a blind cliff 
upon foretold arrival.
I’m just drowning in the same verbs
 
I don’t approve of lakes without
lifelines to the oceans.
Is it so much to expect a foyer
or at least a foundation 
something consistent with 
blueprints, please, or what did we
hire you for?
 
I was in Ireland.
And at the bed & breakfast where my
sister spilled tea all across the fine 
Irish linen there was a foyer.
Beneath the table directly across from
the entrance, a taxidermized
fox. And on the table to the left, a
bird of prey, and to the right another
immortalized corpse of a creature
and yet nowhere for one
to seat oneself.
Now, I’m not one to question
the recreation of psychopaths
––in fact I rather support it 
in spite of the implications––
but it’s speckled the fine splayed
hairs of this lung with resin
and not even the craftsman can
recreate the original organ.
These creatures may rest in this
place, but have you prescient heart and
beating mind–you may not stay here.
Move through, your room is upstairs.
 
After arrival but before that
fine Irish linen’s destruction,
the innkeeper and I took a walk about
the property & came upon a
prodigious stone tower not unlike the
ruins of castles I’d come upon along
the inverse roads of the home country.
Marveling at its height and
architecture and plain existence, I
inquired as to the origins and
purpose of the tower.
“Oh that?” The innkeeper scoffed, 
penetrably, “just some man’s folly.”

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Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland, where she recently earned an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Meredith has poems in Propel Magazine, Cream City Review, Frozen Sea, and elsewhere, and serves as senior editor for Arboreal Literary Magazine.