writing about technology, and vice-versa.
She’s seen fashions change before…
She could sense instinctively when her husband
whom she called “The Good Doctor” out of humor, then habit
was about to trade her in for a new model –
something from the ’30s, perhaps,
something more aggressive in the area of tail fins
perhaps just more aggressive.
The beauty of the evening shade is what
we make of it; the sound of water flowing
down a stream that we cannot see, even
though we peer into a night that has
a moon; a full and round thing shining in
the distance over water towers that we
saw with younger eyes; we told each other
that the cold would never reach our love.
I sat yesterday at the scene of a previous poem,
listening to a unctuous woman recite M. L.
Greenwood’s God Bless the USA,
cringing at how poorly she scanned it.
Poetry is often the refuge of people stuck
between an old truth and a new expression.
and I respect what they’re grasping for, and I’m proud
to be an American
So I played marches with the band,
sitting under a tent in a parking lot
and listened to a recording of I Am the Flag
the high school JROTC played through speakers
connected to someone’s iPhone, while they
passed a folded flag to anyone
who wanted to touch it.
The ritual would not have been diminished by
Quaker silence, an undeclared question.
He played taps again under the tree,
a sweet, sad, eternal bugle call.
…Ranks of books
On the sides — old Miltons, Tolstoys, Wuthering
Heights, Ackermann’s Oxford. A holograph
Copy of Keats’s “To Autumn”…— from The Dream of a House, Reynolds Price
I find myself in medias res
as one always does in dreams
in a small office, such as
an associate professor
at a branch campus
like the one I attended
would have.
and studies proved he was still recognizable.
Parallelograms of any shape or color
provoked recognition of our brand.
We found out later it was caused by smell.
The aroma of our particular plastics plant
fastened as it was to every cup or wrapper,
every test print we produced.
But at the time we posited
that it was the parallel lines,
the suggestion of railroad tracks
stretching to sex or infinity
to what we used to call god.
I rise only to say that I do not intend to say anything.
– Ulysses S. Grant
I wrote as I did
in a spare craftsman style
knowing men died
the entire time I wrote
the entire time they read.
A man could be shot
while hacking though
the thicket of words
created by some generals
and die before he could act.
Knowing, then,
I wrote to dying men
and sometimes sent my dispatches
back to the living world
I demanded clarity of myself.
A scene in The Birds
reminded me of the time
you told me about the time
the old man kept calling you Miss
which reminded you of the time
you played an old woman in a play
in which a young man calls you Miss
We were standing in your kitchen
The cardboard binder and box from LegalZoom
rode in the back seat of her Camry for two years.
The deluxe set, with a company seal,
50 certificates of membership,
and an SS-4 form which we e-filed but never signed.
We were going to be different.
Earnings from an unwanted farmhouse
from an unloved aunt plagued us.
Not the casual sloth of adding a room
or buying a new car for us.
We were going to be different.
for B.W.
My primordial mind has transposed you
with my father’s preacher friend
who died about ten years younger than you
on a bike, wearing no helmet
so it eventually dawns on me that the
helmets, ranging from an ’80s Vetta Italy
to a Giro Prolight with the Roc Loc retention system
and the Shimano cycling shoes, with Look-compatible cleats
(with the patented 9 degrees of float)
are yours; I think (I am very close to waking)
of the short story Content of the Dead Man’s Pockets
by Jack Finney, and I think that your pockets
are garages, the fourth bedroom,
and perhaps the third.
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.
poetrytech 