Michael Palmer. Photo by Juno Gemes
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Falling Down in America
Every three seconds someone over sixty-five
falls down in America.
Our records show
that you are over sixty-five
and may therefore have already
fallen down in America
maybe more than once.
Perhaps upon entering your bath
you slipped
and cracked open your skull
and subsequently drowned
in a pool of blood.
If so, disregard this notice.
Perhaps while gazing at the sea
distractedly one day
your balance failed
and the waves carried you away
toward the irradiated swells
of Fukushima.
If so, never mind—
the flesh has already peeled
from your limbs
and your eyes
have melted in their sockets
in which case
you should disregard this notice.
We need hardly remind you
that many of your friends
and relatives, perhaps beloved uncles,
aunts, cousins, your seven brothers
and sisters, parents assuredly,
may have succumbed in some manner
to the fateful equation
of gravity and age.
In addition, it is likely
that your investments recently caved
and as a result, from the shock,
you fainted upon the cheap
Mexican tiles
of your dining room floor
and days later awoke
among impersonal professionals,
masked and clad in white,
and addressing you
as if you were a child.
If so, you now know
that you are utterly alone
in this life.
Please favor us with a reply
regarding our one-time offer
which will soon expire.
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Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. He has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. His most recent poetry collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan, from New Directions, was published in May of 2021.Early in 2022, Nightboat Books will bring out a new edition of a prose work, The Danish Notebook. [For more on Michael Palmer, see this link.]
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Laurel and Hardy in Hats Off, 1927