Itchy

             Hard to reach, so you yank your clothes

getting at it—the button at your neck,

the knotted shoe. You snake your fingers in

until your nails possess the patch of skin

that’s eating you. And now you’re in the throes

of ecstasy, eyes lolling in your skull,

as if sensing the first time the joy one takes

                     in being purely animal.

             It’s so good to have a scratch,

though isn’t it a drag living like this,

jounced on a high wire of impulses,

every wish the same programmed response

to another signal passed from cell to cell,

amounting in the end to a distraction—

if truth be told—from rarer things, thoughts free

                     from the anchor-chain of self?

             For even the least sweetness, we

behave like the old man on the low wall

I saw outside the hospital today,

who had his hand inside his flannel shirt,

scratching at his chest, trancelike, agog,

his eyelids fluttering like butterflies

in a meadow of snowy Queen Anne’s lace.

                     I never saw him stop.

             Such root satisfaction is like

the dying desert legionnaire’s in films,

when he finds, against all odds, a water jug  

and, lifting it, delights to feel it heavy.

The score swells, his eyes relume. He tugs

the stopper out, then fills his mouth with sand.

Though, worse: we’ve seen the film; we know it’s sand;

                     we gulp it anyway.