_________
you think I’ve got a big ego, I asked
a friend who’d just told me I had one,
not confrontationally but as a matter
of fact, I wasn’t offended, just curious,
I think I’m so humble, I answered,
usually, so deferential
she wouldn’t cede to my, to her,
manifestly improbable, argument
what do you call ego, I asked
what the definition is in the dictionary,
she answered, and pulled out her cell
phone to prove it
sure, I said, I know what the dictionary
says, but how does that apply to me
well, just what it says, she said
my mother reads in the paper that it’s
going to rain today, I said, then it
doesn’t, and I retort that only the
weather essentially knows about the
weather, but she still keeps to the
prognostications
one night I said, look, mom, the moon
is full, no, she answered, it’s a quarter
moon, it said so on the calendar, look,
I said again, it’s full, it’s a full moon,
but she wouldn’t believe me, it turned
out she’d been reading the previous
year’s almanac
print gives us Platonic ideals, standards
that we think definitive, I asserted, but
everything is in the eye of the beholder,
words are just approximations, nothing
but meeting places where we toss around
disparate ideas no firmer, nor distinct,
nor assured than conversations among
different languages, miscommunication
can be that wide
my friend tells me just talking like that
is proof of my big ego, but I still don’t
get it, I think I’m so courteous,
fundamentally, so congenial and, you
know, nice, otherwise
R ! chard
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