The simply unreadable
Expression of pain
From which no
Laborious concoction of gutturals
Slithering consonants and abysmal
Vowels can contrive a fixture
And so it goes off
Into silence.
And I am bothered
By silence
And so I read books to my children,
And snuggle them into their beds
Upon well-fluffed pillows,
And the Care Bear nite-lite
Glows, yellow is its nose below
The glow-in-the-dark stars
We pasted on the ceiling.
But I dislike silence,
I distrust it, I am not
Religious enough for it, you
Might say -- when Blake died
His good friend
Took his wife in
As a servant -- if I die
Who shall take in these children?
And what message
Will gradually spin out of the silence
And into them? Will it be
A message of bitterness?
How may I control
My dying shadow? Will I be remembered
For the bitterness of my
Cigarette-smelling beard,
My children are secured as offerings
In the patient low glow of the nite-lite,
A halo of goldenness,
I have also noticed that glow
Around the Food Lion
Late at night,
When the parking lot is deserted
Except for the dented Camaro
With fine chrome wheels
Of the solitary cashier.
We joke with her, when we go there:
“You look like a model,
What are you doing out of Hollywood?”
She does, indeed, look like the spitting image
Of that African-american model
With the perfect teeth.
For all I know, this statement turns to hurt her
On the quiet drive home
At 2 a.m. or so -- yes indeed,
What am I doing here
In this junk-pit?
I have seen another sort of halo,
The gray one, around much-used doors --
Everyone in the South at least knows what I mean
When I talk about the drifty walk
Of certain retired factory workers
As if dried wind was their skeleton.
For me, please, muse of god, patience, paxil, whatever,
Describe for me a single dandelion,
Its myriad of spiny petals, upturned, insatiate
For the good sun’s drizzle. Yellow flowers
That rise to leak the essence of sun
Back to the sun, a tribute.
And then their eerie, pin-pocked cores.
Dissolving, then, is the wonderful promise.
Let me find a way to say this without irony.
I do not mind being a middle-aged fool
Who sits clueless through a full green light
If you’ve raptured me away with sight of what’s here:
Suffering, lack of foundation. Unconnected
How free the sign is
Unaffixed, mercurial,
Vertiginous --
It muses, like a desperate man
Cruising door to door at 3 a.m. past the dented Camaro
There are many other beauties which have been evident:
Rubbery kelp-strands slung far up the beach,
Sunlight playing through a bottle of whiskey,
A woman who pauses
A stick of cinnamon incense
In front of my nose,
Then oleander;
Oleander in the highway medians,
In billowing white clouds.
The taste of lemonade;
Ringing steel of a snowball to the head;
Thin whistles at the far end of a field.
These sights will continue, occurring in others
Plus there are occasional woman
Who even lust after whiny men,
Such as my wife.
There are cold pills in the near drawer,
Inside the dishwasher -- clean, not dirty !
And all of the rest of the retinue
Of foolishness we say
Since high things are for squawking
Rarely.
As we walk the 12-inch doxie this evening,
The Big Dipper drifts
Above the apartment,
With a curve to it, like
That of her hips
In bed. Behind her, in the mirror,
I see that yellow glow again --
Mirror when will you remember
What I know of you
And show it more
Than the barest silver?
I know that you’re hollow
Of a depth
Which is only illusion
Were life only real
Which it is never.
©2005 by Jack Anders
