down
we sank down beneath a dark line
and were guided by our fear into a pocket of air
we enclosed the yard
rocked the infant spiders in our arms
now my sperm swim restlessly through the ether
at all hours
in all directions
mangy, feisty boston is down
and it looks like rain
the day is like our unfinished train station's
endless, overcost erections
the sky bears down
against my spine
we sank down beneath a dark line
and were guided by our fear into a pocket of air
we enclosed the yard
rocked the infant spiders in our arms
now my sperm swim restlessly through the ether
at all hours
in all directions
mangy, feisty boston is down
and it looks like rain
the day is like our unfinished train station's
endless, overcost erections
the sky bears down
against my spine
1 comments:
A poem that seems to me beautifully right for the season, now that almost unbearable fullness of summer is over, and we're now in the dirty transition from abundance to waste. The soft banality of leaves lying like trash collecting in the gutters. The banality of "it looks
like rain."
Thinking of your grim mood and dark lines, and of senescence and of dread, I hear Yeats: "And he saw how the reeds grew dark / At the coming of night-tide, / And dreamed of the long dim hair / Of Bridget his bride."
The sperm in the ether comes out of nowhere and charges this with a
peculiarity that is more tangible than the surreality of the
spiderlings, or the strange manginess of the city. Tendrils of it hanging in a void, like milk in tea, or gossamer drifting on the
breeze and coating the browning grasses and trees with their strands of substance.
And the close of the Yeats poem: "Old men and young men and young
girls / Were gone like a drifting smoke; [...] But he heard high up in the air / A piper piping away, And never was piping so sad, / And
never was piping so gay."
You seem always to hear a song that if glad, is unreachable, James. And if near, it is woeful.
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