Eventually, you’ll want
to start writing it down,
thinking the story will
spoil otherwise. And then
going downstairs some night,
you’ll think you found a body
underneath some lumber or,
in a grim-comic vein,
thirty years of pulp magazines.
Just a ventriloquist’s dummy,
leering like you expected it to.
Go deeper.
After dropping out of school in the 1920s
After dropping out of school in the 1920s, Cecil Smith, 94, of Westlake Village becomes the oldest known recipient of the GED. [An essay question was] what have you learned since leaving school?
– from a 2002 article by Steve Chawkins, LA Times
You learn to answer questions with more questions,
because you honestly don’t know.
You go to school while young,
but all you learn then
is how answers will fit on a page.
Entanglement
for the woman I saw this morning on the sidewalk outside a Planet Fitness, wearing jorts, drinking coffee out of a to-go cup, and smoking a cigarette.
I’ll begin by admitting
that my entire train of thought this morning
as I worked my way through elliptical,
lower body, and arms
which is where I saw you,
as I was resting between sets
seated at a machine
which is a clear violation of protocol
at all the many gyms I’ve been a member of
may be based on fallacy. You may
have looked through the glass at us
and thought haha losers in which case
you are philosophically miles ahead
of this chautauqua
A Term of Art of War at an Organ Recital
The phrase has pleasing (even pious)
Connotations, like Arbeit Macht Frei,
“Molotov Cocktail,” and Enola Gay.
– From Formal Application, Donald W. Baker (1923-2002)
Deep in meditation by the end of an hour of organ music
in an old church pockmarked by manhole-size plaques
To the Glory of God commemorating rich men’s sons
blown into the next life on the winds of war,
I note the last piece:
Carillion-Sortie – Henri Mulet (1878-1967)
Continue reading “A Term of Art of War at an Organ Recital”Tracking
The new UPS driver looks like he’s been working his way down the corporate ladder.
I think he looks too old for a package car and he looks like he’s about my age
and finally: I’ve seen him looking younger.
It was 1982.
He hung an offensive nickname on me
that spoke of something I’d never even seen, much less done,
and I wore it like the proverbial badge marked Chicken Inspector
or I Felta Thi. How mightily
we called it out when pinching female freshmen’s bottoms.
What cards we were. What utter shits.
The Dream of My Grandfather’s Return
My grandfather at the dinner table of his son-in-law’s farmhouse:
Saltines, sardines, turkey sandwiches, potato salad, jello molds.
The progressive potluck of his hardtack life, coming as it did
toward something like luxury.
The luxury was to sit down – all of his sons and daughters
under the roof, everyone getting along. My father telling
a story about the 1950s that everyone there
except the grandchildren lived through. Laughter.
Helping Someone Name a New Company
for Marianne Moore
We sought a short word or noun phrase which was
unique, easy to pronounce, spelled like it sounds.
It had to convey something of the business without boxing it in,
and of course not already taken: domains, twitter, facebook,
nor have unfortunate interior spellings like newspaperverts or the like.
Oddly Specific
We may sometimes think the ones who died are the fortunate ones,
the deputy director of the regional Veteran’s Administration center
said this afternoon, to a small crowd assembled
under blue polyester awnings,
half of which was the volunteer concert band I was in.
The other half I suspected were spouses or perhaps even children
grown middle-aged themselves waiting for their fathers
to come back home from the war
with heart disease, cancer. And the stroke
of three o’clock found us standing in silence
while the local reporters, strangely beautiful and young
literally ran around with cameras to get the wreath-laying
and my friend playing taps into the paper
like they do every year to remember.
In the Details
We played Mahler’s First Symphony tonight
in a civic orchestra sort of way
but it gave aging rich women a place to
go in their wraps and
my mother-in-law sat with my wife and
said she saw horses and did ‘three-legged-dances.’
There are so many moving parts,
I said. The work has defied the best
orchestra’s efforts to play it, and
to play it, not listen to it, is to
count measures of rest after rest
and wait to come in
wait to come in.
The clarinet part is to sound
like a cuckoo and the conductor
makes crazy faces to inspire you
while his back is turned
to the audience.
The Dream of Uncle Cleo
In my dream, Uncle Cleo stands in his dead brother’s home
and calls suddenly for prayer. “When we die, let us die quickly,
oh Lord, but let us be what we can in the meantime.”
My brother loudly says “amen,” and adds
“I’m having trouble with that ‘be what we can,’ myself.”
Uncle Cleo keeps on in that calm preacher’s voice of his
about our trip, says “there’s no use to leave before daylight.”
In reality, Uncle Cleo died old of diabetes and drink,
a few body parts at a time until his final day at a VA hospital.
I never heard him pray, but he really had that preacher’s voice.
He knew what it was to ‘be what he could,’ having been a sailor,
a shoe salesman, a drinker. He knew what it was to find himself
married on a drunken weekend. His brother didn’t live like this.
The drunken marriage didn’t last the weekend, but there was
another woman who stayed with him through many divorces,
including their own.
poetrytech 