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stork daddy
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wrote this at 3 am last night. a disappointing effort, but i'm glad you gave me
a motivation to write when i otherwise wouldn't. didn't have a computer to
ensure that it be in your inbox by your waking. but here it is nonetheless. i
really did watch some special on the battle of hastings and then hung out with
some friends...so that explains the war-ness of it. hope your day is wonderful.
i loved our exchange last night.
Of all the Wednesdays
Too late to write,
And too warm –
The summer beads
My head sticky
As I try to sleep.
An uncomfortable night
Gives sloppy words
A pass, and they are lusty children
Tracking dirt across the slides of some playground.
I try to watch some tv –
A history channel special on the battle of hastings,
I turn it off before I find out what happened.
Strange, but obvious, how the nights
you most need to write on,
Interfere with doing so.
So you return to them, the way you say last
Wednesday,
As if it is some eternal date
As if it was the battle of hastings.
Crickets outside chirp unacceptably innocent orthodoxies,
Arias of grass and warm air.
I’m thinking of her now,
And the word her, it doesn’t quite do –
It has to. I’m turning and I need to still some corner of the night –
As if she is a flickering streetlight through the curtain of an otherwise dark
room.
Last Wednesday she spoke of love
With an emboldened arc,
that spread over the fields and sidewalks
of my fledgling summer.
Outside a factory churns sound with tidepool rhythms,
For a while, then goes into a deep ocean hum.
We’ll talk again next Wednesday.
In my dreams that night,
William the conqueror
Sails across a dark ocean,
Ordering history to fall under
The cloak of night,
Feverishly unaware of the words
Left scattered in the wake,
And of all the Wednesdays
and of her.
and he must be, and i must be,
to call forth
the nerve; to channel
tense night into
singular words.
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070508
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