Vox Populi
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Robert Wrigley: Self-Pity
Sometimes, in private—another room at least,
another building all the better—you can bask
in the balm and rage of it, you can as a dog does
roll in it like a dead fish on the grass, near a path
walked by mothers with baby strollers
and septuagenarians as healthy as they’ll ever be, like you.
Or else way back in the woods,
no one to hear your pusillanimous contumely,
calling the disease a treacherous fuck and crying.
None of it helps for long anyway, and hammering
a branch across a stump until the branch shatters
is to destiny what a fart is to the weather.
Probably somewhere not far off, there’s a critter,
a raven, say, looking on and wondering
in bird-think lingo what-the-hell is that
thrash and catastrophe and what has it to do with me?
Although you’re through the worst of it now,
seated on the stump like the man from Rodin
and contemplating how for less than a minute there
the worst of it was also the best—
puking it up, shitting it out, the wretched vileness
of it, your momentary logging on
to the never-wired internet of why me,
a flash-glimpse of the collective unconscious of mortality
and the very thing that eats us all,
the gas of it, the fusion, its glistening piston
thoughtless death juice drive of it
into the dark, which is, after all, only dark, really,
and all the better, at some point, to sleep in.
(c) 2023 Robert Wrigley
Robert Wrigley’s many books include The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin Poets, 2022). He serves as Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho.
Vox Populi 
Wonderful Poetry!
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It really is a profound and beautiful poem. It takes us into the embarrassing depths of fear and leads us out of it with love.
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Among many delicious lines, this one: “no one to hear your pusillanimous contumely”
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HA!
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Oh, thank god. ❤
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Thank God because someone else experiences these feelings?
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Why is this author inside my head throwing out all the messiness I I thought I was hiding so successfully? “There needs to be order,” I whisper. I need to appear calm, composed, above rage, above self pity, ooom. Sit! Got this. I need to…. I need.. oh crap. I’m never gonna get that dead fish smell out of this sweatshirt.
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Yes, the poem has taken residence in my head as well.
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Excellent poem, as all of his are. And excellent advice too! I can’t even name my favorite line, because they are all my favorites.
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Bob Wrigley is one of America’s best poets.
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A wonderful poem. So very true.
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I agree.
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This poem is why I begin every day with Vox Populi. I believe and connect with every word of it.
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Yes, Bob Wrigley is a great poet… one of the best we have.
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Oh my. I can’t tell you the places this took me…. What a powerful piece…
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I agree. It is a brave, beautiful and kind of weirdly funny poem.
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Wrenching
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yes it is.
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