I'm currently working on a full length books of poems, editing about 75 pages down to 60. During the process of going through my old work, I came across the poem I've included below. I actually still like this poem. I think it does some really interesting things, but it has no place in a book comprised of mostly things I've written in the past 2-3 years, so I'm including it here. Comments are welcome.
Exigencies
1.
To sway within the cool steady creak of movement,
The road stretches infinitely under this spell:
Swelling through cities and pastures,
Thematic and ordinary;
Tapping our fingers hollowly against the vinyl,
Rocking with distance, asleep in its arms.
Changing in the good china for a room in some town,
A place to gather strength for a night or two
And imagine life in some midwestern town or haven:
Taking a local wife, a bar:
Our surname arching over the doorframe,
Neighbors regaling us with the story of their meeting,
The same sleep of the journey overtaking us in the interim.
2.
The corpse buried beneath the bathtub,
Strung with a wreath of acorns
And planted in accord with the local traditions;
Our intentions sleep there, lost amongst
All that ceremony, decisions put to procrastination:
Strange bedfellows, a diadem affixed to their stilted brow.
3.
Birds swarm over the delta, the arch of their wings
Ensigned toward all they have moved beyond,
And yes, I think there should be cicadas:
Omens appropriately veiled,
Can you see what I have learned?
Poems need omens, and cicadas.
The word wrung bare over a clothesline,
Smelling of wind, even a bit
Of the farm up the hill:
The rain is drying in the afternoon sun,
I listen to it: there is no sound,
In these hills on the darkest nights,
We still sense the quivering
And flickering of the flame, ever restless.
4.
Portend me some participles if but for this instance,
They told me there are two stories
I can tell you, they begin as such:
“A stranger comes to town,” or “a journey begins,”
I am thinking of a third, but do not know how or where to begin.
5.
All summer we took tennis court oaths,
Bending the geometry of each electric yellow ball
Around white lines reticent with judgment,
And later lineament for aching wrists and shoulders
Unused to such calculated swings:
What can be gleaned from within that axis:
Another pauper living alone on grapes and olives
Strewn by the racquet scythe.
Each day a black cat
Crosses our path, its tail arched up
Issued into a question, it is but one shape of luck,
Our very own foxhole
From which we issue our report.
6.
Listen to silverware clatter in the drawer,
The sound of it clean and crisp
In the dark, silent house,
Understanding the sound, but not
How to listen and explain
What one knows to others,
Bringing us into this present phase
Of some intimate stranger’s words
Calling out for negotiation.
7.
Where branches once grew large
Are knobby lumps of sinew:
There are several along
The trunks of trees that line the lot,
All but healed over by the quick of thin bark,
Unburdened by memory or wanderlust,
They are maps to a steadfast and spiraling center:
We could cut them open
To find the answers, but prefer the mystery therein.
We took a left when we should have
Gone right and found the road led nowhere,
Its yellow lines disappearing into darkness,
Pavement gradually giving away
To the black beginnings of night
That even our fog lights could not penetrate:
The empty treeless field, barren of moonlight,
Colonial settlers would not have dared
Travel through such emptiness
On a night so dark.
8.
We walk tentatively forward, our feet
Crunching down onto ice that has formed
Around the severed stalks of some old crop,
They protrude intermittently, thin and reeded,
And break when we try to touch them, are also frozen;
Some future plan must exist for this place,
Some ad hoc amusement to rattle the wind
And undo all this mystery,
Its permanence always a question.
0 comments:
Post a Comment