The Dream of Walking
Without preamble
as to why I haven’t been doing it
I begin to wonder if I can walk again.
The details come back to me in retrospect:
an accident, perhaps a wheelchair,
perhaps an eternal afternoon on a couch.
But I can stand,
I reason to myself, and
the memory is equally clear
standing up to shave, or speak.
The mundane reality of the afterworld,
of life after the thing that happened.
When I was in the hospital I dreamed simply
of walking, waking to find myself on fire
with pain, tied down with tubes.
I wake needing to urinate.
I stumble to the bathroom
before realizing the mundane reality.
Still Alive
I didn’t post in the entire month of April. You know – poetry month. I suck. But I’m still alive and will be back at it.
Zeugma Workshop defunct
Kind of a sad topic for my 100th post, but I guess it’s fitting that one milestone is marked by another. The Zeugma Workshop (www.zpoems.net) is no more, at least for now. Read more…
Mark Van Doren
The deepest dream is of mad governors,
Down, down we feel it, till the very crust
Of the world cracks, and where there was no dust,
Atoms of ruin rise.
- The Deepest Dream – Mark Van Doren (1894-1972)
He appears, inexplicably,
on a panel talking about the death of JFK,
the day after, late in life, surely years after
he wrote The Deepest Dream.
He doesn’t say much. Unlike his son,
not given the answers, he doesn’t
wind on like the others, doesn’t speak at all
until late in the program, and then
speaks mainly of the past.
But then later, coming to this:
Whoever did this…
defeated his own end more completely
than one can say.
But then, he is still speaking
of the past, of Brutus and Cassius,
of Lincoln. Perhaps thinking
of the early church.
The camera pans the eminent men:
the historian
the jurist
the professor
the worldly philosopher
and seems as dazed as they seem
in the wake of the few lucid words
that anyone can say.
Marker
Here
some famous people lived
before they were famous
or for a brief period
where they hid out from fame
and did ordinary things:
dishes
a slow dance to the radio
taxes
each other
A bus rumbles by each day
on the last leg of a crosstown journey
stops before getting to Walgreens
a man picks up his backpack
which rested against the sign.
Donut Shop Moment
nothing can ever taste
as good as the smell
pavlovian anticipation
of red flashing neon
green glass
and white counters
Pentametron
I wish I could say I thought of this, but you can’t make this sort of thing up.
