August Ticking Away

August 2017- “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”                                                                                                                    William Faulkner, Light in August

New Work- 2017 From new audio collection intended release in the Fall – details pending in Cold Millers

 

The 18^th Sunday of Ordinary Time

After going to St. Agnes for early morning mass that Sunday with Edna

 

Next we stopped at the IGA

 

And I happened to run across by chance one of my poems

in the frozen food isle.

It was about 70 years no and hand on a pink pin striped shirt w/ button down collars and gold wire rim glasses sporting a dignified full head of neatly cropped

Snow white hair that when it spotted me out of the blue years exclaimed in pure

Wonderment as I crossed his path near the potato chips

Exclaimed- My God……are you still alive ?

 The nature of the observation was delivered in anything far from a

Congratulatory intonation or tone.

Stunned  I merely shrugged checked out thinking about this

after in the parking lot as I returned to the car to put away the groceries in the back seat and told my mom I forgot something inside the store and would be right back.

Marched right into the IGA again. Quickly scanning all the isles asking for it.

Spotted that sorry SOB

at the end of the succotash aisle

Ran that Poem down- and he saw me coming too none to happy about it.

 

I confronted it and introduced myself and forced it to shake my hand and

Asked just what the hell as the meaning of previous  remark ?

 

At this point it got real sheepish, with lower eyes mumbling something

About Lucky Ward hastily shoved off to meat counter.

 

And I couldn’t resist I yelled after him-

 

Yeah well- you always were a lousy poem anyway 

Uncollected 2017

*

Long Island Sound

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fN9ImKKkXfw

Now in this past of a punched ticket

at low tide I drink down this July sun.

Cathedral afternoon of canopy blue

in an endless awning sky;

 

Myself looking at the sealed plastic bag

of fiddler crabs as bait

thinking how hot and doomed it was inside

there.

 

Now after the rituals were observed

and completed nude solitary on the beach

Walking as elderly on the thousand stones

toward the water

wanting into the cold salty stinging sound

Your balls drawn up into a hard sphere

The waves at you ass the erect nipples

the water licking everything in degrees at once.

 

The excitement form the prospect of entering her

as she enter you.

These ten years past her flesh now sea better yet sound

Under this sky, bright bare to the shoreline shoulder

 

I’m dunking. Going under. Full immersion. Opening my

eyes underneath. The pressure of the silence has its

tongue in my ear. I’m coming up for air. I push off

and explode in high white foam.

 

I look back on the beach

to see who is lying under the makeshift driftwood

lean-to as the Sound breeze chops the darker blue

waters white while fluttering the contour sheet

in animated penciled in ripples.

 

And I recall falling into your eyes that moment

and never looking down

still finding I never, ever hit the bottom.

Even now.

Another Rubber Eden   7/91-2/93

*

 

Ordinary Roar

 

July will linger just near the door

as it is time now to go

and in a sigh or perhaps that an ordinary roar

informs the waning afternoon in the calendars

numerical voice that your number is up.

What startles you with all its whispering are

concussions that wakes the waves to break

and erode the short eroded rocky bug infested

disappearing shoreline.

 

I hear strange voices in this ardent insistent wind.

I feel a tongue just inches from my ear that speaks

‘in that sigh or ordinary roar that these years I

was assured I wouldn’t be able to hear anymore.

All about this hazy animation of dirty white foam

driven madly on and upon.

So parade a secession of walkers across the face in

the beach. They nod or speak appearing as apparitions

that drift windblown on the most silent of feet.

Only some will find the courage to speak.

 

Scraps of paper and fragments of prose difficult to define

whip by in a helpless driven fury.

Now expression has little opportunity for introspection

or reflection. The art of language has been lost in

the stiff insistence of a brisk lake gust of wind.

And the sky above is so blue and blank

and it’s almost like time herself has slipped out

of her harness and has run on the shoreline

riding on the wind, being blown all over the beach

naked, wild and free of the sigh or that ordinary roar

of us as July lingers near the calendars door.

Another Rubber Eden   7/95

*

Her Roll Of Lost Pictures.

 

So then his thunder was exposed as an endangered species.

Your brief downpour of words soaked the situation to everyone’s

dissatisfaction. They have this sure fleeting flash of

momentary light. Illumination to a la carte

Sure shows everything up. You can count on it.

But only so far for tonight. (and of course there are

expressly no substitutions.)

 

Move this night like a set of negatives never exposed

within aperture. Seems the film just never became tightly enough

twisted in a circle about the housing.

 

Much was missed. Still no one had the guts or the smarts to

question the intent. . . . but near the end I seemed to over

hear some smug talk from somebody so very intent on making

a point to everyone’s satisfaction.

 

Or was that barter: trade you your cross to bear for my axe

to grind: or Sure… you can remain the foremost expert in the

 

following category: most likely to be lost in translation.

 

I can’t change the way you waste one of the last few good

days at the start of September (like you had lots).

 

Let’s just try a small voice then saying, “if you have to

go, make the most of the season. Fall into October’s arms

already ablaze intent upon.

 

And if you find you don’t have anyone’s name to call

when autumn’s dream coat flashes some spectrum vivid;

remember how I once waited up for you call

while dropping plenty like the number of thunderstorms

left you could count on your

right hand after August.

Another Rubber Eden    9/97