Putting Away the Dollhouse
There's a child in the hallway
Waiting to enter a question
Like a moth to a bulb.
Sharp cuts in:
The honeysuckle are asking, is there
Any other world for a redolence
So adolescently received
It’s unable to be smelt
Among all the hullabaloo Dewey eschewed?
Ann means:
Reconsider your noisy thoughts.
The inquiries the child cherishes are
Stored like solace in the dollhouse;
Now placed in a middle school attic.
The heat may melt what it took years
To place in the right rooms:
We withhold our vanity in the parlor;
Our seasonal wardrobe of belief, in the armoire;
Conflict tableaus in the vestibule.
Ann adjoins:
And the atrium houses a criterion
So imperial your query will
Need to hang its hat there on
The rack and stay a while.
Have a cup of Earl Grey with me
As we g.....a....s….p
At the awesome forever of its flavor,
Relish our march to the question mark,
Savor the dollhouse parlor
Where answers are as temporary as ice.
© Copyright 2010 by Christopher Parker
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
In Memory of 9/11
An Exchange at the World Trade Center
Your city misses you. On rainy nights it whines from its streets and everything that must be discussed drifts from the manholes like steam. You are there in the faces I seem to recognize while riding the elevator to the top of the twin tower. The sun was just down and there was enough light to see into Brooklyn, my brick nest, and into the long island and Staten Island. The suspension bridges lit like candles in the hands of children arranged in a line according to size, and the breeze was almost a wind that said: "pull your feeble jacket around you."
The glint in your eye came on in every light. And as the sky became darker and the slow ferries moved in the bay I knew this city was poison, like vodka in the sweet orange juice and this made me want more and I wanted to drink it all and I couldn't speak I was so drunk with it. And down below -- and I had to lean far over the railing to see this -- but far below a man carrying a parcel moved swiftly into a revolving door and was out of sight and he was you and I called your name in my mind so loudly that a light went on in Flatbush and a ferry struck a pier and a car jolted in a pot hole. I said, this is your city and you are here with me in this wind.
And a lovely blonde walked by; she was dressed a little oddly and spoke in a foreign language to her friends and I loved her so much on the roof of all cities but to take her in my arms would have ruined the little web this instant hung in. She took pictures in the dark that I knew would never develop and I took the same pictures of you and thought they would last forever and at least they lasted till now that I can tell you of them.
You were there too, in the little acrylic lens of her instamatic, snapping the pyrotechnics of a life form that has so much to say one language would never do and no one could ever know even her own part of it.
Habla espanol?
No, un poquito solamente.
Aye, lo siento, lo siento.
I am sorry but your were there, and you must have been thinking of New York because a seagull soared near a low roof and what it saw came to you in a dream or painful reverie and your thought was heavy and long like a steel beam and it moved with grace like a barge on the Hudson and was as eloquent as an actor in a space below Canal street which flowed with all it I wanted it to be, the way if flowed when it was a real canal. But now it's petrified like the dreams you had: cobblestones placed in the street before you were born and on their underside the name of every desire, like the names of church donors.
And the trolley tracks speak out under a wheel now and then, but they don't mean any harm and everyone knows the trolley won’t be back the way it was, the way you said it was before you drank so much that you didn't see the pain crawl up on you and strike you down, the Vesey Street Phone Company your great tomb, in nineteen sixty the tenth tallest building in Manhattan. Now it's off the lists and out of the almanac like anyone whose time is gone, if we ever had a time.
copyright 2010 by Christopher Parker
Your city misses you. On rainy nights it whines from its streets and everything that must be discussed drifts from the manholes like steam. You are there in the faces I seem to recognize while riding the elevator to the top of the twin tower. The sun was just down and there was enough light to see into Brooklyn, my brick nest, and into the long island and Staten Island. The suspension bridges lit like candles in the hands of children arranged in a line according to size, and the breeze was almost a wind that said: "pull your feeble jacket around you."
The glint in your eye came on in every light. And as the sky became darker and the slow ferries moved in the bay I knew this city was poison, like vodka in the sweet orange juice and this made me want more and I wanted to drink it all and I couldn't speak I was so drunk with it. And down below -- and I had to lean far over the railing to see this -- but far below a man carrying a parcel moved swiftly into a revolving door and was out of sight and he was you and I called your name in my mind so loudly that a light went on in Flatbush and a ferry struck a pier and a car jolted in a pot hole. I said, this is your city and you are here with me in this wind.
And a lovely blonde walked by; she was dressed a little oddly and spoke in a foreign language to her friends and I loved her so much on the roof of all cities but to take her in my arms would have ruined the little web this instant hung in. She took pictures in the dark that I knew would never develop and I took the same pictures of you and thought they would last forever and at least they lasted till now that I can tell you of them.
You were there too, in the little acrylic lens of her instamatic, snapping the pyrotechnics of a life form that has so much to say one language would never do and no one could ever know even her own part of it.
Habla espanol?
No, un poquito solamente.
Aye, lo siento, lo siento.
I am sorry but your were there, and you must have been thinking of New York because a seagull soared near a low roof and what it saw came to you in a dream or painful reverie and your thought was heavy and long like a steel beam and it moved with grace like a barge on the Hudson and was as eloquent as an actor in a space below Canal street which flowed with all it I wanted it to be, the way if flowed when it was a real canal. But now it's petrified like the dreams you had: cobblestones placed in the street before you were born and on their underside the name of every desire, like the names of church donors.
And the trolley tracks speak out under a wheel now and then, but they don't mean any harm and everyone knows the trolley won’t be back the way it was, the way you said it was before you drank so much that you didn't see the pain crawl up on you and strike you down, the Vesey Street Phone Company your great tomb, in nineteen sixty the tenth tallest building in Manhattan. Now it's off the lists and out of the almanac like anyone whose time is gone, if we ever had a time.
copyright 2010 by Christopher Parker
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
