A Man of Thirty-Five, Smooth and White, Slight, Well-Bred, and Masterful

“A Man of Thirty-Five, Smooth and White, Slight, Well-Bred, and Masterful”* Simone White (bio) what use gold tokens pulled from the earlobe of my mother left me like divorce, like a treatise on divorce this has to be couched in the language of dream we’ve been enjoined from the discourse of marriage forever coupling in corners hypogeal fungi only, rotten each grandiose bully taken in hand, forgiven, wheedled artfully toward respect; no diadem, no veil, no tiny be-ribboned dog mhm, indicating assent let me tell it, no you tell it this has to be couched in the language of dream—crude, to say “I love” excepting the person of the President of the United States a lingering terror brought on by devotional music another bedraggled text from my brother or, I’ve no one to talk to about my life if my father had lived a lot longer we would have ventured an explanation of my method not a form of bragging [End Page 1079] since he knew me as a person attached to the frank limitations of freshness in a body too much alive there was water coming off the house and slate shingles that was the year he was thirty-seven—he noticed the orbit was failing he recognized inattention whipping up his wife and daughters weekly the high school was overtaken by neologism throwed-off and I was living in an attic room fanning myself shingle casuistry said he ought to get in his Mercedes and get the fuck out of there [End Page 1080] Simone White Simone White is author of House Envy of All the World (forthcoming from Factory School/Heretical Texts). Her work has appeared in Dolly, a collaborative chapbook with the painter Kim Thomas (Q Ave Press), Ploughshares, Tuesday, An Art Project, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, and the exhibition catalog for The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Flow. She holds a JD from Harvard University Law School and an MFA from The New School in New York City. A resident of Brooklyn, she is currently studying for the PhD in English at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Footnotes * Title taken from The Quest of the Silver Fleece by W. E. B. Du Bois. Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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