Incendiary Lit

Another Argument About the Impossible
by Lawrence Raab

Even if we agree in principle that a poem can be
about anything, you still want to claim
it cannot include space aliens,
since by their very nature (you insist)
they are silly. And even if belief
is a subject that’s stood the test of time,
a poem about a man who believes in space aliens
will be a poem about a man who is either
silly or demented. Belief requires
a world of consequence all around it:
men, women, nature, history, and so on.
Reality, of course, is another matter, but see
what happens (you continue) when these
are put together, as in: “My work
concerns the nature of reality, belief,
and space aliens.” It would be different
if we knew they were there, but we don’t,
and a poem cannot afford to adopt
such a wait-and-see attitude toward the world
which, after all, has provided so many
more compelling subjects. No (you conclude),
not even a poem that argues against them
can survive their presence,
not even if the aliens never appear,
never do or say anything, never threaten us
with their neutron blasters, never steal our women
to populate their planet, not even if their ships
remain hidden, and we are never taken up in them
to be probed and instructed, dazzled and released.

–

from his collection The Probable World, and also collected in Visible Signs; New and Selected Poems. Buy them both for under $2 at amazon. You won’t regret it. They’re great. Very easy to read, and very entertaining.

–

Cool huh? I bet most people have something to say to the speaker about the concept of extra-terrestrial life, or you laughed and thought “yes,” *sniff from the snifter of cognac* “a poem about an alien, how wickedly absurd.” Then the cackle that can only be made with a glinting gold monocle string dangling in front of the left cheek. But, that is covered in the poem. Because although it’s a discussion about discussion about unknowable (and therefore impossible to prove or disprove) things, it leaves a back door by saying “It would be different / if we knew they were there, but we don’t,” because of course, now, the concept of at least some form of alien life in the incalculable depths of space seem all but assured. However, by including that statement, it recalls the time before modern space research when aliens were Metalunans in shiny silver suits and massive foreheads– like the speaker in the poem says “silly.” So a poem that argues for aliens, and against aliens can’t survive the reality of aliens… if they float down one day in their ship with a computerized Rosetta Stone and open the world of earth in on a galactic empire, everything will change. But this poem isn’t arguing for or against aliens. It’s arguing for the argument, and for the concept of a discussion about unknowable things.

The poem is one I’ve come to associate closely with Raab’s style. Very conversational, even including dialog, presents a question in an anecdotal fashion, and ends with a series of images. Not a bad way to lay out a poem if you ask me.

–

Writing exercises:

Write a poem that is your take on aliens. Place it in an anecdotal, or at least loosely narrative setting. Raab’s poem uses poetry to root the discussion in the real, for your poem use current events. Be it high or low culture, root this opinion about aliens in a very specific time, so that even if they do descend, this poem could possibly survive as a ‘pre-alien’ historical document. Or, at least a glimpse into a specific time with an alien tilt.

Write a poem that follows the general pattern of this poem. A narrative poem that digresses a number of times, that presents an argument, or concept that is left somewhat in the air for debate, that is very conversational in tone, and ends with an anaphoric word and series of 3-4 images.

That Will to Divest

Action creates
a taste
for itself.
Meaning: once
you’ve swept
the shelves
of spoons
and plates
you kept
for guests,
it gets harder
not to also
simplify the larder,
not to dismiss
rooms, not to divest yourself
of all the chairs
but one, not
to test what
singleness can bear,
once you’ve begun.

—

This poem doesn’t have the same density sonic singularity of many of Ryan’s other poems, but the theme is very easy to grasp, and very easy to empathize with. I, at least, take a long time to get cleaning and ‘thinning’ out my stash of crap, but when it gets started, minimalism sometimes shimmers off the seas of horded booty like old copies of Esquire or workshopped drafts of old poems. What would it be like to just rid yourself of the junk that you really don’t need? DVDs and silverware. The toaster and the fifth beach towel. How cool would it be to be able to flit around without that shackle of stuff. But, then I normally realize how awesome my stuff is. How great it is to fall asleep to MST3K yet again, or to be able to take digital photos (and don’t even think about taking photoshop from me). Ahhh… a romantic theme in a way. So, not as intense sonics, but very cool idea, right?

This poem also originally appeared in The New Yorker, and was in her book Elephant Rocks.

A Cat/A Future

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she’s
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

—

There’s a lot of compressed rhyme in there, or at least assonance: blinds/eyes/decides/likewise, stare/there/(there) and occlude/rude. Occlude is a slightly odd usage, but come on, it’s poetry, home of slightly odd word usages. This poem, however, didn’t quite do it for me, if you know what I mean. I like the bit about the cat’s second set of eyelids, and I get the comparison to the unknown duality of the future (good/bad, or polite/rude) but I think that it needed a little more. Not a lot, but something. As it is, unlike “Blandeur,” if I read it in the New Yorker without hearing about her before, this poem wouldn’t make me run out and buy her book.

I love Albert Goldbarth… he and David Kirby and Campbell McGrath kind of form a meandering narrative/linking-narratives prosey poem that I just eat up by the bucketful… but it can be a bit consuming to read one of these poems. Lots of tangents and returning to base can slow the read a bit, in order to be sure which narrative thread you’re actually following. But it’s worth it. Here’s Albert Goldbarth’s “Marble-Sized Song” which appeared in Poetry, and on July 21, 2008 on PoetryDaily.com.

Marble-Sized Song

Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,
undoing its petals and laminae, and going in
below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical
coffer where self-understanding is storaged away,
and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study
in its nakedness as it spins
in a clinical light?—the way
we all, in our various individual versions
of this common human urge, go in,
and in, and in, the physicist down
to the string-vibration underlying matter, and
the Appalachia fiddler getting so
(as she puts it) “into my music,” sound becomes
a flesh for her to intimately (”in”-timately)
enter, “its thick and its sweetbreads.”
Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns
that he’s insulted, but for certainty
you’ll need to delicately strip the bark away
and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide
of the pith and can augur the chitterlings
—the way the philosopher can’t accept a surface
assumption of truth, but needs to peel back
the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer
into a blow-away foam, and then with pick
and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin
spelunking through those splayed-out caverns
under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried
—the way the diver descends for the pearl,
the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down
the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way
the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes
a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,
and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,
the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,
toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center
of his head…. If we could stand beyond the border
of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem
that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency
that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe’s
irreversible expansion out, and out … and each
of us, a contribution to that task.
My friend John’s wife received the news: a “growth,”
a “mass,” on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.
And the primary-care physician said: Yes,
we must go in and in. That couldn’t be the final word!
And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,
my sweet-and-shivering-one,
my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,
someone’s-dearest, you
who said the prayers at Juliette’s grave, who drove
all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you
on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin
in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,
yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,
yes we must go in and in.

The Death of Fred Snodgrass
by David Kirby

San Francisco,
April 6, 1974.
It says here
in the Chronicle:
“Fred Snodgrass,
who muffed
an easy fly ball
that helped
to cost
The New York Giants
the 1912
World Series,
died yesterday
at age 86.”
Fuck you,
Fred Snodgrass.
Some things
we never forget.

–
Then there’s a cool article from the Southern Review’s January 2000 issue about David Kirby’s poetry, if you have access to your school’s library you can access it here, or there’s at least the beginning of it available online, which is pretty interesting. Titled “The Invention of the Kirby Poem” by Peter Klappert.

Too bad it’s just me. We’re going to work on getting more stuff though. Check out track 5 in the player to hear my rejected entry for the CV2 2-Day Poem contest. The poem’s titled “He Waits.” It’s a sestina. Whee.

OK, here’s what a heroic crown is: 15 sonnets, ordered with a repetition. Sonnet 1 begins with line A, and ends with line B. Sonnet 2 begins with line B and ends with line C. Sonnet 3 begins with line C and ends with line D and so on, until Sonnet 14 which begins with the last line of Sonnet 13, and ends with the first line of Sonnet 1. Then the kicker is Sonnet 15 which consists of all the first lines, though if you want them in order it’s up to you. I believe a classic Heroic Crown has the first lines in order, which is another rhyme scheme to keep in mind. We’ll begin on Wednesday, I’ll work on a heroic sonnet as you do, I’ll post helpful tidbits (I hope) that will help you keep on track for this highly organized series of poems. But it’s also a sequence that you can be proud of. How many people have had the discipline to organize a Heroic Crown, or any sequence of sonnets at all? Even if the results fluctuate poem by poem, why not give it a shot, it’ll be very similar to using an firestarter exercise or any other writing exercise, but instead, for a week you’ll focus on sonnets, and a repetition of certain lines. As I said, I’ll be posting various excercises to help maintain focus and organization for the long haul. As you probably noticed, 15 poems and 20 days means a few non poem days. These will be organization days and brainstorming days, because in order to interweave your poems even more, it’s nice to have an idea of what you’ll be writing about later, and perhaps mingle some imagery in the process… Wednesday will begin the Incendiary Lit Heroic Crown Affair.

It’s Billy Collins’s poem “Workshop” and it’s so accurate, and the poem so absurd I wish I got to read the poem critiqued. It would have to be better than much of what I’ve read in workshops. There’s audio and the poem at this link. Billy Collins introduces the poem and reads it. He kind of sounds like Kevin Spacey, doesn’t he? Poets.org is just awesome. Thank you Poets.org for providing such an enormous well of information. Here’s the poem.

Workshop
by Billy Collins
(more…)

In the great tome that is the new Gulf Coast, which I sadly haven’t been able to delve terribly deep into yet, I did, however, find a classic Lawrence Raab poem playing out scenarios stemming from movies, literature and nuclear fission. I love that guy. So here’s the poem.

Mad Doctors
by Lawrence Raab

Even as children they always went too far.
What will happen, they keep thinking,
if I pull that switch, strike this match?
Maybe no one told them not to,
or explained, logically, what could go wrong.
Then they were playing with lightning,

wondering what they would do if they didn’t
have to die. Consider Doctor Cyclops,
stuck in the middle of the jungle
with his radium, making things small.

It’s 1940, five years before Hiroshima.
Even then science wasn’t on our side.
In the movies, Albert Decker’s
shaved head makes him monstrous
and impressive, and a little like a child.
Yet he seems to have no past–

no wife to bring back from the dead,
no motive for evil, nothing but research.
His eyes are bad and he hardly sleeps.
We should remember Doctor Cyclops

from time to time, and Doctor Frankenstein,
Doctor Jekyll, and Doctor X.
They were all deceived by ambition,
although they behaved themselves
betrayed by the world.

Maybe no one ever told them
we don’t need to live forever.
Maybe no one explained, exactly,
the logic of it.

Loitering for Dawn
by Patrick Carrington

I’ve been waiting on the beach since three.
Chased from the Ugly Mug by last call,
from the boardwalk by cherrytops
I walked the streets with cats—I hide

from the night patrols behind plywood
that leans against its future,
cabana windows it will veil for winter,
and watch surf fishers arrive to set their lines

in the Atlantic. As I stare off at Ireland
smoking Marlboros down to the filter,
the night has pity and misbehaves for me—

she undresses her diamonds, jewels of fine
karat to consider for play or purchase.
Tempted, I resist the urge to strip for her,

to walk naked to the water and let her lick
me clean, to swim into her dark, wet love
or perhaps even back home
to Bantry Bay. In needy times like this, I
actually think I might make it. I zip my coat

and notions and save myself from the dawn.
The hours could be spent at better profit,
I suppose. But I fear
the morning sky, without a suitor,
might find no reason to unfasten her robe.

“Loitering for Dawn” was originally published in Cairn, (aka the St. Andrews Review). I liked this poem because it was relatable. Though I’d never personally hung out after a late night drunk and waited on the beach for sunrise, it sounds like something I would do. The imagery is really sweet too. This just barely missed the cut into our “Better Than the Movies” anthology for 2007, which we’ll hopefully be posting within the next couple weeks in one form or another.

Yeah, I just decided, after looking around at other blogs, that it wouldn’t be entirely uncalled for to post a few of my own poems, as long as I don’t preoccupy the blog with them. In fact it seems like people like to be able to see the blogger isn’t a complete hack (I claim only 42% hack), so here is a poem that appeared in the Spring 2007 Roanoke Review. Enjoy! (or else)

In Bed at 4am
by Zebulon Huset

Lying face down on my waterbed,
I imagine that I am a corpse on the river.
Any river, as long as it’s slow, and viciously polluted,
the mucous foam being the spandex-microbead pillow
clenched tightly between my knees,
and the current rippling under me with every limb-twitch.
The distension in my stomach is from trapped methane,
and not the oversized portion of spaghetti.
The soft whirring of my shitake-looking
oscillating fan is the noise of birds
fighting to be the first to pick my bones clean.
With my eyes closed I can imagine this
and I can picture the small details—
the insects climbing the reeds by shore,
each with their own little mission to accomplish,
all for the same greater goal of survival—
the cumulonimbus clouds behind my head,
waiting to drop their hydro-burden on the city,
Boston or Minneapolis or St. Louis. It doesn’t matter.
The rain will come and cop cars will splash the water
in the streets like Moses’ parting Broadway,
and in their wake will follow the chosen yellow cabs.
These thoughts help me sleep, induce the coma
of REM, where I can dream of happy things,
though I hardly ever do. Dreams slip from me
like days when nothing bad happens, beads of water,
but the nightmares, those are more like honey:
that sickening sweetness that draws insects like
a crystalline messiah, like a bloated corpse run aground
of the dirty river quietly slipping out of town.

People write them as writing exercises, as little trials of their poetic ability before they return to their free verse (with, or without jigging lines and tumors of whitespace) and write their poems. I’ve been reading around in a couple dozen literary journals (scratch that, few dozen) and have seen more formal poetry than I expected. A good number of sonnets (here’s a refresher on the sonnet’s rules). I know some of you out there make a habit of writing formal poetry, in fact I’ve been turning to it fairly frequently lately in a chase after content matching form. I’ve got a paradelle on the backburner about two brothers in different stages of “Why are you hitting yourself?” amidst some fairly dire circumstances… which is all about the repetition having not only a purpose, but a need. Some poems almost need a specific form. Why? Well, in the rough blob of a first draft (despite how polished you feel your first drafts are, revision is important too.), sometimes there will be an echo of a form. Perhaps a curious repetition or the poem will be 14 lines with an accidental slant rhyme in three places already. You might see the vague form of a sestina, villanelle, sonnet, rondeau… and then there is an aesthetic goal. And to reach that goal you have to weight every line, every foot, syllable, for its importance (looking that close at any poem is a good idea) in order to meet that self-set goal, to reorder a scene, rephrase, to stretch your mind for the best result. And, you know, sometimes the poem just doesn’t fit a form. But sometimes it does, and the only thing that will come from attempting to adapt a free verse piece into a formal poem is that you will know your poem inside and out, and will have a very good head start on the next draft of your poem. So try it yourself:

The Cremation of Shelley
by Lawrence Raab

August 15, 1822

All around was scenery–
the ocean and its islands, watchtowers
along the coast, mountains
glittering like marble. Trelawny imagined
the spirit of his friend soaring above him.

And he thought, We’re no better
than a pack of dogs
dragging him back into the light.
Three white wands
marked the place where he’d been buried,

lime thrown over him, the yellow sand
shovelled in. And now
they had to dig him out. Who could speak?
Even Byron was silent.
When they heard the hollow sound

of iron on bone, Byron asked
if Trelawny would save the skull for him,
but remembering that he had formerly
used one as a drinking-cup, I was determined
Shelley’s should not be so profaned.

After the fire was lit they poured
wine over the body, causing the flames
to glisten and quiver. Then the corpse
fell open, and the heart
was laid bare. Byron turned away,

walked back to the beach,
swam out to his boat. Leigh Hunt
stayed inside his carriage. Everything
turned to ash, but what surprised us all
was that the heart remained entire.

The poet’s heart! Of course
it should resist the tire.
But why? As fitting that it burn,
if brighter than the rest.
Trelawny reached in and snatched it out.

No one saw him do it,
though his hand was badly hurt.
Every detail, he would write,
of the life of a man of genius
is interesting. But no more

about the heart–how much
he wanted it. I collected
the human ashes and placed them in a box.
Buried in Rome
with the appropriate ceremonies.

–
I really liked this poem from his awesome book The Probable World (under $1 used at amazon), and kept trying to remember where I knew the story from, years after first reading it. Then I kept mixing it up with Galway Kinnell’s wonderful poem “Shelley” which deals with Shelley’s life detached a bit from his work.

Writing exercise: Find a good biography of a favorite writer. Or check wikipedia. There’s a ton of authors with interesting biographical information available. Write a poem about that interesting fact. Poems that teach the reader something interesting that they didn’t already know are always more resonant.

Capp Street Incident
by Jon Boilard
(Caution, adult subject matter)

She stands under the 101 overpass on Capp Street. When I pull up she sticks her head through the window, parting my legs with her hand. I ask her how much. She tells me and then gets in. We pull around the corner to a spot she likes. She looks vaguely familiar but I don’t say anything. She puts the condom on me with her mouth. After a few minutes she says, Baby, you got to hurry; I got to get back out there on the stroll. I tell her not to worry about finishing me. She is relieved. She cleans her mess and puts everything–the money, the limp rubber, the soiled tissues–in her little black purse. Then I remember. Her name is Del and I recognize her from high school. We had Spanish together. She had a crush on me and I never gave her the time of day. When I mention this she laughs and says, Boy the tables are turned now. I laugh, too, and then she gets out. She says, Baby you shouldn’t drive in that condition. I smile and ease away from the curb. I smell her from ten blocks away. Cigarettes and sweat and dirty feet. Then I get sick some more in the Office Depot parking lot. With an old newspaper I clean what ends up on me. I try to picture the girl she used to be and I cannot. It is difficult enough to remember what I was like back then.

—

“Capp Street Incident” was originally published in the Summer-Fall 2006 issue of Fugue, literary magazine from the University of Idaho. The prose poem/flash fiction is very resonant. Everyone imagines what people they once knew are doing now, at least once in awhile. And the juxtaposition of the girl having a crush on him, and him paying her for sex is terribly ironic. Also, it’s about sex,in a way at least, but it never gets gross or very graphic, which is nice. I’ve read my share of bad, bad poetry sex while working on different literary journals, and this was a nice, understated example. And the end feels so right for the situation… so human.

Now try a ‘reminiscent’ poem of your own with a dramatic twist. Like in “Capp Street Incident” see someone that seems familiar, realize where you know them from (at least eight years before) and remember a little anecdote between the narrator and character. Have the anecdote be ironic considering the present, somewhat drastic situation (be it during a robbery, a traffic accident, jail, whatever).

Accident
by Todd Davis

They tell the son, who tells his friends
at school, that the father’s death was
an accident, that the rifle went off
while he was cleaning it. I’m not sure
why he couldn’t wait. We understand
the ones who decide to leave us in February,
even as late as March. Snows swell.
Sun disappears. Hunting season ends.
With two deer in the freezer and family
can survive. I know sometimes
it feels like you’ve come to the end
of something. Sometimes you just want
to sit down beneath a hemlock and never go
back. But this late in the year, when plum
trees have opened their blossoms?
Yesterday it was so warm we slept
with the windows open. Smell of forsythia
right there in the room. I swear
you could hear the last few flowers open,
silk petals come undone, a soft sound
like a pad sliding through a gun’s battle,
white cloth soaked in bore cleaner,
removing the leas, the copper, the carbon
that fouls everything. My son knows
you don’t die cleaning your rifle:
the chamber’s always open.
I told him to nod his head anyway
when his friend tells the story,
to say yes as many times as it takes,
to never forget the smell of smoke
and concrete, the little bit of light
one bulb gives off in a basement
with no windows.

This originally appeared in the Indiana Review Vol. 29 No. 1. I thoroughly enjoyed this poem, perhaps partly due to the fact I was raised in a deer hunting home in a deer hunting region, where occasionally a hunter had a ‘cleaning accident’ which could be possible if said hunter was a complete drunk, but… the imagery is great, and I especially loved the listing of suicide reasons, “Snows swell. / Sun disappears. / Hunting season ends” the plainspoken, staccato sentences really work well. The last image is a haunting one that I can just imagine the son’s poor friend stumbling upon after the ‘accident’ and it makes me muy triste.

Use this poem as a springboard for a poem of your own, now. Think of a lie that people just ‘nod along’ with. This is especially true when dealing with children (Santa, dog ran away etc) but also guys brag about things they’ve never done, people lie about their jobs when they run into people from high school ten years later, there’re plenty of major, and not so major lies that happen all the time. Pick one, and come up with a short narrative about it. Why you (or your character) just go along with something they/you know isn’t true. And end your poem with an image.

This poem is from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems, and I gotta say beforehand that I love Charles Simic. I didn’t realize before I bought his newest selected and new that I actually already owned the majority of the books these poems are collected from, but it was definitely still worth it. Here’s a really cool poem from the “new” section of the book.

“Little Night Music”
by Charles Simic

Of neighbors’ voices and dishes
Being cleared away
On long summer evenings
With the windows open
As we sat on the back stairs,
Smoking and sipping beer.

The memory of that moment,
So sweet at first,
The two of us chatting away,
Till the stars made us quiet.
We drew close
And held fast to each other
As if in sudden danger.

That one time, I didn’t recognize
Your voice, or dare turn
To look at your face
As you spoke of us being born
With so little apparent cause.
I could think of nothing to say.
The music over, the night cold.

I just love how the last stanza turns the image for you to see another facet of it. Another perspective in the light of slightly different nostalgic circumstances. And the polarity of the emotions radiating from the two takes on the same little evening (through (perhaps subconscious) selective memory, though it could even be an entirely separate occasion) makes the second all that more tragic. Makes me want to say haha. Anyway, here’s a pretty good review of this book by Brad Luen.

Guerilla Poetry is just like guerilla warfare or guerilla adrvertising (stickers and posters a street signs, walls etc.) only with poetry. Guerilla Poetics is one group that does this, and Incendiary Lit would like to be another, but we’d need your help! We’re planning on making little photo bookmarks mostly (so very short lined poems are ideal), taking them into all the bookstores and libraries we (and anyone who’d be willing to help, we’d send the  bookmarks to you and everything) can find and hiding them in popular books, as well as some more traditional flyers, to put around various college campuses, malls, maybe solicitor style under windshields with a christmas poem at christmas time. Who knows. We’d like to see/hear your ideas or poem suggestions (yours or others’) to zebulonhuset (a-t) yahoo (diz-zot) com(edy). Hopefully that’ll avoid spammers, or just comment here. Word. Any photographers or artists who’d be willing to help with graphics would be greatly appreciated as well.

I’m posting mine, but please, anyone writing a Poem a Day with Poetic Asides, the Writer’s Digest blog, or just on your own, please post into the comments, we’d love to read what everyone else is writing for this festive holiday month.

This was published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Black Warrior Review. Very nice.

Let it Come Down
Ian Harris

Despite being afraid of catching cholera
from standing water,
I am playing with ships in the bath.
This is maybe 1983.
After my bath I will look at a National Geographic.
The stereo is playing a Shankar record
and my mother is reading the tarot.
I am too young to know it yet but
I will hold a state record in the 200-meter butterfly
and fall in love with a girl from the coast of Oregon.
Other things are less clear. Colors of cars rode in?
Names of girls fucked at swim meets?
I once thought I remembered looking onto a Persian city
spread in the night like a phosphorescent octopus,
but it turns out it was a scene I’d read from a Paul Bowles novel
in which a man whose pockets are filled with good ganja
finds himself about to enter a city he’s never been in.
It wasn’t in the cards for him, so you know. It ends badly.

The Shrinking Lonely Sestina
by Miller Williams

Somewhere in everyone’s head something points toward home,
a dashboard’s floating compass, turning all the time
to keep from turning. It doesn’t matter how we come
to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes
the way it went once, where nothing holds fast
to where it belongs, or what you’ve risen or fallen to.

What the bubble always points to,
whether we notice it or not, is home.
It may be true that if you move fast
everything fades away, that given time
and noise enough, every memory goes
into the blackness, and if new ones come–

small, mole-like memories that come
to live in the furry dark–they, too,
curl up and die. But Carol goes
to high school now. John works at home
what days he can to spend some time
with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.

Ellen won’t eat her breakfast.
Your sister was going to come
but didn’t have the time.
Some mornings at one or two
or three I want you home
a lot, but then it goes.

It all goes.
Hold on fast
to thoughts of home
when they come.
They’re going to
less with time.

Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.

Forgive me that. One time it wasn’t fast.
A myth goes that when the quick years come
then you will, too. Me, I’ll still be home.