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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.
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.
Handwritten
for M.B.
A handwritten note I found
that had nothing to do with me
and wasn’t particularly wrenching
or well-enjambed
still startled me
because the handwriting,
the blue lines and charcoal grey
reminded me of days in school
when you would write to me
thinking about me instead of
world geography.
The faint smell of your wrists
and the sweetness of paper itself
I imagine it in
a handwritten note I found
that had nothing to do with me.
My wife and I exchanged letters
by the mail across hundreds of miles
before we were married, and still
write things in cards three times
a year – but mostly we text, and
keep our grocery list synched.
She sends me an emoticon kiss.
It’s love like I hope you have
with your husband now.
I believe it in
a handwritten note I found
that had nothing to do with me.
Somewhat after the style of Leonard Cohen; Tedious explanation of what I’m up to after the cut. Read more…
Dreaming About the Software
Not sure I’m ready to write poetry about it yet, but I’ve been working 60 hour weeks on a software project at work – installing some new software. One of the recurring themes with the software, and one that’s taking many people at work a great deal to get used to, is the fact that the software now touches on every department of the company, whereas the old accounting software just did the billing and purchase orders after everyone got through pushing the product around the building.
And of course I’ve been dreaming about the software. The TV show I saw last night, and how it would relate to the software. The book I read, and how the characters would deal with the software. The fact that I need to go to the bathroom and yet don’t want to get out of the warm bed and into the cold bathroom, and how this fact would be entered in the software…
My Son Procrastinates on a Poetry Assignment
He’s working on it now, suffering
the classic symptoms of writer’s block,
or more likely a keener interest in Team Fortress II
I’ve inspired him with these great one-liners:
It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, but it does have to be in Monday, buddy.
Try writing a poem about writing a poem*
and that ever-helpful
Just write what you know.
*making this a poem about writing a poem about writing a poem?
Celebrity
For J.
But you’re the diffident one
who has trouble looking me in the eye
and we sit out back of my house
you smoke and get your throat down a half-step
(use a capo; you’ll live longer I joke)
and you go out there night after night on the road.
I slip a hundred dollar bill in your case when you’re not looking
And wish I had made more of myself.
Morphine Dreams
in my dreams I was always walking somewhere
half-aware even in my dreams
I wasn’t walking anywhere
not for the time
being I’d had an accident in one
I stood behind a man speaking
on a podium he was leaning back
against me a heavy
weight a marching band advancing
everyone on their feet a
strange rhythm made musical
by repetition
muffled drums and low brass.
I half-woke hearing the solenoids of
some hospital bedside machine
clacking the music I’d heard.
