Merperson

On Having Lunch With Someone I Love Whom the World Thinks is Crazy

Merperson has a fondness
for a small stringed puppet
of a businessman –

found abandoned
in Long Island Sound –
perhaps thrown overboard

by some bored human being
drinking lemonade
and getting tan.

Merperson likes to fondle him
while making him dance
something like a can-can –

floating with him in the greeny sea
with lovely fatuous complacency.
which somehow makes me

understand that I have never seen –
nor can, I think, expect to see –
one creature capable of choice

that doesn’t do exactly
what it wants or isn’t
what it wants to be.

.