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I Could Find No Verse
On Poetry of the Personal
After turning on the oscillating sprinkler
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I Could Find No Verse — to PR and family I could find no verse that gave what I might give to allay your days of sorrow so I found a place where irises fell, smashed underfoot and that long view over the lake to a boat’s foam disappeared into fog or worse— I could find no poem that held that awful weight as if anyone could imagine the weight you bear now, when the world finally turned lovely, green until everything woke vague opaque as false dawn after a bad dream. You know the kind, you carry it all day, how the surreal images persist, robbed of any train of meaning lost in a stupor of grief for what you cannot hold and what will never heal I could find no verse emptied of its shallow promise that tomorrow would be better. That ship is gone. The irises fold in on themselves again. Nothing will be the same: the train wakes you, obscene dream, and still you must go on.
On Poetry of the Personal
Listen: I am not sure
the secrets you’ve hidden,
as lovely in the landscape as
they might be, are rich enough
to reveal.
Your metaphor
is clever and I like
your use of color but
when I walk down the hill
into town
and all the bright white lashes
across the blazing bay
move me and make me
understand how
lucky I am
I stop wanting to break
open the complexity
in your own attempt
to poeticize. Perhaps
some parts of our lives
are too narrow
and isolated to hope
to universalize, or maybe
you stopped living
once you started to write.
No matter.
These robins still bring
their fledglings
into my garden. Need I
remind myself it is not
necessarily
out of attachment
to me even as I
turn the earth
and sing?
After turning on the oscillating sprinkler can running out from under the advancing arc of water be that much of a problem? There comes a time when you don’t care anymore and soon enough memory a secret bliss the passing of moments as the water bows down on you frees you from any wavering commitment to being aroused and losing the last vestiges of sleep. Look! Morning moves over the house through rosy towers of digitalis as the curtain of water arrives shining across the garden! There is so much to shed even beyond sleep and the unfathomable fixtures in dreams—
Reminder: Poetry from Compendium: The Kitchen Sink is best read on a laptop, tablet, or PC. iPhones tend to scramble line endings and stanzas.
Three moving, beautiful poems to awake our senses and our minds.