Thursday, November 09, 2006

Poem-babble

I think this is actually bits of two or three poems, crammed into one and missing other pieces, but this is approximately how it occurred to me and I can always work on it from there. (Approximately because it showed up in rush hour traffic on the freeway, and I thus had to remember it for a while before writing it down. I'm sure that mutated it further.)

Two days after the election, I step out
into an afternoon of sunlight on pale clouds,
brilliant, bewitching. As if change were
a god smiling down on all of us, and
the 'we' who won and 'them' who lost
were not equally nebulous, indistinct
as droplets in a storm cloud. As if
I wasn't still blind to the future,
the far-off possible indistinct. Thinking
we know which clouds bring too little rain,
which too much, until the ground is
buried under a torrent. And then do we ask
who brought this bucket-full and added it,
who brought that bucket-full? Or do we simply
wait out the worst of the water, and begin
shoveling mud from the porch, the living room,
again? Trying to make everything exactly
the way it was. The distance between that
and what can be done is as wide as an hour
of the past, and as uncrossable.

1 comment:

Leah said...

this is excellent. it's funny, i get a lot of ideas while driving too...artist-brain activity. :-)