Life, Oblique

[Image: “Georgetown,” by Kevin Dooley. Found the original at Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!).]

From whiskey river:

Road Warriors

My traveling clothes light up the noon.
I’ve been on my way for a long time
                                                            back to the past,
That irreconcilable city.
Everyone wants to join me, it seems, and I let them.
Roadside flowers drive me to distraction,
                                                                    dragonflies
Hover like lapus lazuli, there, just out of reach.

Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy,
Unsettled, seven yards short of immortality
And a yard short of not long to live.
Better to sit down in the tall grass
                                                        and watch the clouds,
To lift our faces up to the sky,
Considering—for most of us—our lives have been a constant mistake.

(Charles Wright [source])

…and:

If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.

(Pablo Neruda [source])

…and:

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

(Dan Albergotti [source])

…and:

Things happen to a person; that is, life deals you a set of cards and you play them as you are able. If I do my best I can and make no trouble for my neighbors, then surely I cannot be blamed either for my existence or my government. There are forces that buffet us through life that no mere individual can withstand. Better to stick to my books and musings about literature and leave the government to those who know best. That was certainly what I believed for years, but this evening I had begun to wonder, foolishly perhaps, if it wasn’t that sort of thinking which had helped bring about this current state of affairs.

(Stephen Dobyns [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Growing a Bear

Growing a bear — a midnight occupation,
the need for which you perhaps first realized
when you saw the wrong kind of shadow

under your chin — a convex when you expected
concave, so now it’s clear
you’re getting older. Your wife was in the shower

and you wanted to step inside
and soap her up like you did in college when she said

“I’ll shower with you, but I’m leaving
my underwear on,” and you enjoyed her
in every way you could enjoy a person with soap.

You didn’t join your wife in the shower.
She’s gotten funny about letting you see her
shave her legs or wash herself anywhere.

You think she read it somewhere —
that letting your husband see you pluck anything,
trim anything, apply medicine to anything,
will make him feel like he’s furniture.

It’s exactly on cold nights like these that the basement
is not as forbidding as it should be, despite the fact
that you have to put gloves on
in what is part of your own home.

Downstairs, a large bathtub, kept, for some reason,
after remodeling. It is there that your bear will be grown,
by you, though you have no idea how. Probably wishing

is most of it; fertilizer, chunks of raw stew meat,
handfuls of blackberries, two metal rakes, and a thick rug
make up the rest. Then water.

You get an e-mail from a friend late at night
saying he can’t sleep. You write back
“I hope you feel sleepy soon” and think how childish
the word “sleepy” is. And you’re a man,
older than most of the people you see on television.

You haven’t even considered how your wife will feel
when you have finished growing your bear. You could
write a letter to her tonight, explaining how your life
was just so lacking in bear:

“Janet, it’s nothing you’ve done —
clearly you have no possible way of supplying me with a bear
or any of the activities I might be able to enjoy
after acquiring the bear.”

It might just be best
to keep the two worlds separate.
Janet clearly prefers things to be comfortable
and unchallenging. Janet soaps herself up. Janet puts herself
to bed, and you just happen to be next to her.

You go on your weekly bike ride with Mark and tell him
that you’ve been growing a bear. An eighteen-wheeler
flies by and he doesn’t seem to hear you —
plus he’s focused on the hill.

You think about how not all friends know
what each other sounds like when struggling and
breathing heavy. Past the age of college athletics,
most friends don’t even know what each others’ bodies
look like, flushed, tired, showering, cold.

(Hannah Gamble [source])

I loved that last poem first for the surrealism… Only after re-reading it for the sixth or eleventh time did I catch onto the simple typo which (I imagine, and kinda hope) may have inspired it. (Carpe “d”!)