Strange Perfecter
Strange Perfecter
by Chris Andrews
Who was that strange perfecter occasionally
stepping in to give my life a sideways nudge?
Or was it just a series of accidents?
Despite the multiplying data there’s not
necessarily anyone on your case
in a world where biometric differences
can cover up the gulf that is fixed between
darlings of Morpheus and insomniacs
strapped into the home theatres of their thought,
or between people who feel that the real life
is intimated by bare, windswept uplands
and those who want to live where rhinoplasty
is already as normal as filling teeth.
I was the perfect stranger continually
stumbling by chance back into my life to find
it was getting on pretty well without me
in a world where what people wear correlates
poorly with what they’re capable of doing
to someone who’ll never be useful to them,
where some can sing an ache to sleep and others
are quite sure they know what intelligence is.
I like the transposition of “strange perfecter” and “perfect stranger”–both entering the poet’s life but with significant as opposed to insignificant consequences–and enjoy the contradictory images of the two but can’t quite wrap my mind around them. I’m left with the impression, which corresponds to my experience, that whatever enters our lives to perfect it a little by our estimation may be the same thing in ourselves that enters others’ lives to little or no effect.