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From Another Other Within, Without

Pimone Triplett

Say your body’s
life-size trip clock
starts in schlep

on the down slope.
Then the long hand
slaloms you steep

as your face tocks
the take of nine-to-five.
It’s just your timing

and mindset that’s semi-
rattled, and everyone
comes to the skit a little

pusillanimous to begin.
What is a kind of
smudgy justice:

the ancestors’ DNA
in full wig effect,
frizzy edges crimped,

oblivious to wind.
Are you really inside
that mirror slice?

Pacing over past
junkets still, a hybrid
hallucination got

stock-carded into
a being strange to be,
like that griffen

who slips so casual
onto someone else’s
map of laughing tropic

locales. Friend, look hard.
Mix. Step out. The center
bit by bit gets beiged.

You are one hundred
percent half-and-half.
In the hemi is the how.

Pimone Triplett’s most recent book is Supply Chain (University of Iowa Press, 2017).

About Pimone Triplett

Themes

About this Poem

“I very much wanted the experience of the poem to be a wash of language, with many words seeming to be suggested by, or reflected off of, what comes before them. I suppose the poem is somewhat mimetic of its own notions, where history and heritage are odd glints coming at the waiting consciousness rather than originating from it, like reflections rather than sources of light. I’d been thinking about the narratives, or shaped histories, that are in place long before any individual’s arrival on the scene. And I wondered in this particular poem how the self’s formation might be intensified (or thwarted?) by the accidents, or destinies, of a mixed-race heritage (or at least, a sense that one’s parents, in my case, come from very different cultural zones). Then, I wound up adding how one’s inner life is also made contingent by our various life stages. The poem ends on a more assertive note, a kind of mini-manifesto that wobbles, I hope, between sincerity and tongue-in-cheek.”
—Pimone Triplett

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More by this poet

Past Light

Within reach of sex but not yet, I remember, a few stars 
          freckling the vacancies 
past the yard’s blown flood beams and father’s single 
          sycamore. Expert amateur, 
I thought myself, aged thirteen, rabid for facts and trying 
          to have a mind for 
what each light was. This I knew: arrivals of gaseous crackups 
          wholly unlike us, and not 
pinpricks, nor quaint connect-the-dots, nor tiny stabs of will. 
          Sky’s Zenith, Lyra, The Great, The Small Bear. 
Hopes rose.

Pimone Triplett

2005

Poems

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From Another Other Within, Without

More by this poet

Past Light

badlands: a song of flux, out of time

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