There's a pervasive travelogue quality to even the best poems.
It's like the quiet inside can only be explained by the screaming
That comes in sporadic drive-by rounds, like copters circling,
And silence again, like end rhymes, the only sense to be made or
known.
A dog snaps, as if finally broken by the suburban routine.
We've been told to stay at home, as if the air
Was tuberculer. We can hear its wind, but not the stories
That keep the neighborhood alive, breathing with laughter.
The cat meows at another cat in the mirror.
A piano is played after an interminable delay.
The surveillance blades above seem to harmonize, in a way
The muffled voices never do, as they wait—seemingly forever—for
resolution.
It's Sunday afternoon. I want to research the Gnostics but
I've been turned by unidentifiable forces to longing and diversion
And chasing the cat through limpid rooms—
Protected from the lies, I suppose, by never finding the truth.
So, when the quiet resumes, it seems like an answer
To the questions forced by the noise, that in their asking
Left no connection to what I'd heard unexplored.
What came forth from the darkness was the darkness,
A kind of light, not unlike the glints of sun on the rosemary
And our extraordinary capacity to make of it anything we want,
Salve for wounded souls or redolence of old homes.
Some guitar, for example, that I can't control, comes in now
And each room of the house is a different place to go
With distinct characters, timelines and narrative twists,
What I can't even really hear, above the momentary motor
That could be a chainsaw, lawnmower, model plane—it doesn't matter.
