Is the type of throat clearing
they tell you not to do in workshops – the coughing phlegm
of a lawn mower first cranked in spring, after priming the bowl
and yanking on the rope until your shoulders ache and
you sweat and curse, tired before any work is done.
Excerpt from “At a Country Funeral” by Wendell Berry
What we owe the future
is not a new start, for we can only begin
with what has happened. We owe the future
the past, the long knowledge
that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.
Good Night
One night this week I didn’t have to
grocery shop, go meet a group of hopeful strivers, or
fix a document the damn phone wouldn’t stop for all day.
This job
takes something out of me. Most think it’s the screen time,
but I like the predictable blink of the cursor, the average
of the e-mail response time. What gets me is the relentlessness
of the vague: being switched away from a problem I was gaining on,
listening to someone for some clue one of us knows
what they’re talking about. Sleep doesn’t cure it. It’s like
being woken up 16 times a day.
Dull Sermon
He bleats a grey cardboard version of the word of God.
He makes me wish I believed in the kind of Spirit
which strikes men and women with prophecy
or else shuts their mouths to wait for a true saying.
Not the god of committee meetings, an ice-milk
calling no one else heard; a gentleman’s C
In Communications at a community Bible college.
He should have been a farmer.
Maybe then he would have understood
dry days and lightning on the plain,
What it is to work, curse and be cursed,
wrestle with God until your hip pops. He
should read Reynolds Price. He
should weep because he doesn’t understand,
not crow three points about how I don’t.
Jesus.
You Never Had It So Good (#11, State Fair, Act I)
There are performers,
Acting as singers and dancers in an Iowa State Fair.
In the original they were singers and dancers
In a Broadway musical, and perhaps
obliged to act like they weren’t as good as they were.
Tonight’s performance is in a community theatre
which perhaps simplifies the process.
There is an audience on the stage
watching the performers
who are performing the act
of watching; they comment on the show
at the fair they’re not part of.
Tabula Rasa
They wrote as if engraved in marble,
and you, the always understood you,
reading the inscription in an elegiac field.
Great gift, to have their topic so determined.
To have that appearance of inevitability,
and the silent space in which to write it.
If it failed to grip it was still graceful,
uninterrupted. The long line of the work
went on, as in the Odyssey.
Online and Off
for W.R.
I keep finding you as a friend of friends,
or in the spuriously precise terms of LinkedIn,
a 2nd degree connection. You’ve added
various certifications and jobs at companies
which weren’t even around in the days
we worked around a so-called platonic attraction.
The ways we fit together broke down under the strain.
Portrait
Sometimes, as with Isak Dinesen,
Raymond Chandler, LBJ, or other famous people,
a casual picture becomes their life-mask –
shown on any book cover, documentary,
or magazine article, their logos.
They may
have been returning from a restaurant
or sitting, waiting for some entertainment
to start when someone produced
the massive picture-taking equipment.
They gamely smiled, or didn’t –
just another day in their typical age.
What if they had known this shot
would become what they were known as,
that others would not recognize them
ten minutes before or hence?
I’m Sorry I Haven’t Written
I’m sorry I haven’t written
I’ve been reading magazines
and sometimes playing guitar.
I have a recurring dream about
an elegiac passage
but all I wake with is the rhythm.
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.
poetrytech 