WATERMARK

Well, I’ve had nothing new, nothing real, to offer here in some time – two weeks with no “snapshot” – so I am going to take the leap and post these raw, midnight ramblings. Perhaps one day some of it will become a poem. Perhaps not.

I have been moving Oratory to TypePad, another of those tedious, detail tasks that seem to occupy me lately. I sit at the computer, in front of the television, thinking deeply of nothing. Is this focus on minutiae giving me some sense of control ~ in this life where there is so little?

Easier to think of designing websites and making pretties than to think down, where feeling and terror reside. Politics now make me feel particularly powerless, as lies win battle after battle.

Things break and I cannot fix them, nor afford to get them fixed. And there seem to be no poems in me.

If there were a poem in me, what words would it have?

rain, and thunder
heavy darkness across the moon
dogs scolding me sadly for neglect
abrasive male voices arguing with each other
sheets unchanged in weeks

words like campaign, and fear, and nice wives and daughters
valiantly attempting to humanize their husbands, their fathers

cruelty, and greed –

& my own greed for my own comforts

friends lost to wounds and lovers

how one can indulge and deprive oneself simultaneously

the terrible reproach of wood and glass

a phone ringing in a far room

the large absence of human touch; the body’s rebellion

how the night insistently reclaims the heart
and parades it, naked, through streets of dreams

how recording old poems opens the vault, empty of new ones

how women who keep or invent their own names
give to their children the names of their fathers

seeing a father weep at his daughter’s leaving

how daughters must leave
sooner or later
to become themselves

how so many don’t
the need to be claimed
the terrible seduction
of surrender and pink hats

how nudity and dancing become shocking protest,
“art”, as in “artifact”, as in “artificial”

how we forget we are animals

how we wander away from home
how this tree does not miss us