The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Daniel Bourne
Dead Weight
Think of the dead weight of air, the low slant of sun that slices through the window, your father out on his rounds, and you at the kitchen table, writing your poem. Each step he takes up in the loft might be his last, and you are writing your poem. Your stomach sick with the yellow glare, the flies crawling the screen as the green hay builds up its anger, the seething that turns into fire, a cave hollowed out not by water but smolder. It is this way that your world will burn its own nest. Your father takes one more step and breaks through the surface. And you would carry him out if you could. O stupid son! Draw back your chair. North of Niagara, Bruce Peninsula, I Think of Dead Actors
Zoo-Zee Zoo-Zee Zoo-Zee, feathered Cary Grant, black throated green warbler not quite getting the pitch, pine- jumping along the escarpment; C-130 troop plane hard on the throttle, on practice patrol over Whipperwill Bay or could it be a real Mayday call, a crew on Georgian Bay poised to be the next ghosts shipped to the deep of the lake, ancient falls drowned at the end of the last Ice Age, brooding to this day of their own demise, white dolomite and plush guzzle as the engine labors so hard to keep itself aloft, the call of songbirds drowned out while back at our farmhouse in Ohio these same gray planes ungainly as school buses banked just above our chimney, the squeal and roar of training after September 11th, guardsmen from Kent, Macedonia or Mansfield hurtled into the cobbled web of this war. So how can there be un-self-conscious metaphors here? The cliff face mere inches from our feet, our necks crane to get a look at these two rock climbers that scramble to the east, their spiderly ambition so frail against stone, my mind’s dour web filmed in black and white, last night’s dream of my son’s smile as he leaped off the balcony. Like Fred Astaire—though I know I tell it badly. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |