A goiter it seems I got from this backward craning
like the cats get there in Lombardy, or wherever
--bad water, they say, from lapping their fetid river.
My belly, tugged under my chin, 's all out of whack.
Beard points like a finger at heaven. Near the back
of my neck, skull scrapes where a hunchback's hump would be.
I'm pigeon-breasted, a harpy! Face dribbled--see?--
like a Byzantine floor, mosaic. From all this straining
my guts and my hambones tangle, pretty near.
Thank God I can swivel my buttocks round for ballast.
Feet are out of sight; they just scuffle round, erratic.
Up front my hide's tight elastic; in the rear
it's slack and droopy, except where crimps have callused.
I'm bent like a bow, half-round, type Asiatic.
Not odd that what's on my mind,
when expressed, comes out weird, jumbled. Don't berate;
no gun with its barrel screwy can shoot straight.
Giovanni, come agitate
for my pride, my poor dead art! I don't belong!
Who's a painter? Me? No way! They've got me wrong.

~John Frederick Nims

Nims has been a visiting professor and Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard. His Commencement poem, "The Observatory Ode," appeared in the September-October 1978 issue of this magazine. His latest books of poetry are The Six-Cornered Snowflake (New Directions) and Zany in Denim (University of Arkansas); his translation of Euripides' Suppliant Women will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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