swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

has-to-be shifting
Constantine Contogenis

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THE MALTESE FALCON

“The only necessity that exists is logical necessity.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not that you’ll watch it a first time again, but that logic
loosens with memory. And those parked 1940s cars
convey a this-now’s-real, no? Then this knockout
walks in— Huh, Spade’s face had a make-up artist?

and who cares— oh, the younger Wittgenstein?!
That hotrod logician has, what, souped-up your jalopy?
I mean, you can’t even give metaphor a literal ride.
It’s Spade’s dusty office, desk, and blinds you want.

Or maybe you believe the logician will offer you a lift
all the way from the things the camera makes
to those it shows. Twined in tattered newsprint,
on a table, minding its own logical space,

stands the MacGuffin, the camera feeling it up
to imagined unimaginably rich riches.
Spade believes the knockout but makes her strip,
fingers the seams. To be certain. So what love.

Ripped by frantic hands down to implied
feathers, the statuette is a matte black con,
till Guttman opens his pocket knife (the dodges
of the last owner in mind, disguising disguises)

and slices off a first curl of lead: no gold.
The apodictic blade poised— Remember now, be smart,
you’re seeing both real and fake statues. — Impossible?
I know, I know, same space, same time, and so on.

Yet two of the thieves, numb to their impossible burdens,
seem lightened by the has-to-be shifting to a happens-
to-be necessity; while you, weak from the failure
and disarmed by their second billing, can’t keep your feeling
from going out to the film’s one sweet give-and-
take scene, their making space for each other.

The cast, compelled to flout the absent script,
drag their heels or sneak off, acting like no rubber
band’s attached. A few of them revisit
the through line and the ending, then live lives for us.

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Constantine Contogenis has been published in numerous journals including Whiskey Island, Paris Review, Pequod, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Cimarron Review, Literary Imagination, MacGuffin, Meridian Anthology Of Contemporary Poetry, Western Humanities Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Orleans Review, NY Quarterly, Nimrod, Red Wheelbarrow, South Carolina Review, Speakeasy, Yale Review, May Day, Hayden’s Ferry, and Scarlet: Literary Journal.  His work was featured by Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion program. Contogenis is also a finalist for the 2024 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. His collection Ikaros (Word Press, 2004) won a First Prize “Open Voice Poetry Award” from Writer’s Voice.  He co-translated Songs of the Kisaeng: Courtesan Poetry of the Last Korean Dynasty (BOA Editions, 1997).  His work appears in Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American: Oxford 2004-2009, chosen by Christopher Ricks (2011), and Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, ed. Dean Kostos (2008).