Poetry Month: Day Twenty-One

Poetry Foundation's mobile app allows you to save and share poems that tickle your fancy. I recently switched to a new phone and, to rebuild my favorites archive, had to comb my archived mail for poems sent to various siblings, parents or friends from the previous device.(Poetry Foundation discontinued use of User Profiles.  The app uses local storage per device) This is a poem I shared with my youngest brother, with a nod to our mutual enjoyment of playing Acrophobia.  (Alas, Acrophobia is no more. To enjoy similar experience, consider playing AcroChallenge or AcroFever)

Anagrammer

Peter Pereira

If you believe in the magic of language,

then Elvis really Lives

and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin.

If you believe the letters themselves

contain a power within them,

then you understand

what makes outside tedious,

how desperation becomes a rope ends it.

The circular logic that allows senator to become treason,

and treason to become atoners.

That eleven plus two is twelve plus one,

and an admirer is also married.

That if you could just rearrange things the right way

you’d find your true life,

the right path, the answer to your questions:

you’d understand how the Titanic

turns into that ice tin,

and debit card becomes bad credit.

How listen is the same as silent,

and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

Peter Pereira, "Anagrammer" from What's Written on the Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2007). www.coppercanyonpress.org