Category: Poems & poem-like things

it is so difficult to write to that future which none of us
can see, and harder still sometimes to find the right voice

for addressing what they said was only the wind,
or unborn generations disguised as distant foothills;
nothing more menacing than landscape or weather,

hope like the legend of a country ready to be
colonized by benevolence, if not for a revolution
that spread like wildfire up and down the coast.

I told my daughter the story of the general’s wife;
how she took up his cause after he fell in battle,
how she was captured. And she paused, considering

the grave weight of sacrifice; or more precisely,
the little heft one body signifies against the tide.
Closer at hand, night brings shrouds of phantoms

into view and they are everything we’ve come to know
so intimately from daily life— The stolen words, the lies
of men of state; their bland oblivion to what they see

only as the tedium of pedestrian suffering.
And we may be slow, as slow as morning
that forgives so much as it begins to trace

the circle over again: so much like history,
so much like what repeats as many times
as it will take, until it finds the break.

In response to small stone (145).

It says, You stood me up. You don’t return
my calls or texts. You didn’t go to work
yesterday. I wanted to ask whom you met
for lunch. What did you eat, and where
did you go afterwards? I waited at the bar
till 1 a.m. then took a walk and fell asleep
on a bench at the end of the pier. I woke
quite stiff, feeling crumpled at the edges.
No one bothered me, not even the seagulls
raucous for their breakfast. From above,
I must have looked like an ink-colored speck,
mere footnote amid the city’s detritus.
My fingers hover above the keypad as I listen
to the prompt: To erase, press *7.

In response to Via Negativa: Asterisk.

from Fr. ricochet (n.) “the skipping of a shot, or of a flat stone on water,” in earliest use … fable du ricochet, an entertainment in which the teller of a tale skillfully evades questions, and chanson du ricochet, a kind of repetitious song; of uncertain origin… from 1769.

Clouds gather. They’re always gathering. Sometimes the black dog comes to call. It brings
a little news of you: how you hardly think of home since you’ve split, sprinted, ricocheted.

Into the giant Sears Roebuck Catalog of the universe, I’ve sent countless orders.
Sometimes I can’t figure out actual deliveries from those that have ricocheted.

Light rain bounces off the pavement at summer’s end. Who invented the silly rule that
one can’t wear white after Labor Day? Classics are among the best forms of ricochet.

Last night you were introduced at the bar to the Car Bomb: whiskey on Irish cream
floated into a shot glass, then dropped into a Guinness: foam’s heady ricochet.

Skim and bounce, carom, rebound; mash and bump, kiss and touch, sideswipe and graze.
Climb over the fence with me: what’s left to do but watch the fireflies ricochet?

In response to small stone (144).