Since I began writing a day early
or perhaps on the eve of, therefore,
I am either a day ahead of the game,
or I've lost a day to post
yet another small poem
due to a profound lack of time.
This morning brought a mural.
We transformed an acre of white silk
into layered mountains and valleys
teaming with exotic wildlife
only a first grader could imagine.
The afternoon rattled three papers
due for an evening class in the City
and three classes of poetry journals
waiting to be rendered into the electronic word.
I raced against time, and left a child's poem
undone (on his 9th birthday times 3, he is a triplet).
It was unsorted and irregular in its body
strange diacritical marks like bird tracks in bay mud
the typos like gaping wounds
or crimson stretchmarks, a birthing of sorts.
Returning late from evening class,
I was stuck in a traffic jam on the Bay Bridge.
At the maw that leads to Treasure Island
an ambulance and a towtruck wriggled past us.
Night Two seamlessly slid into the Day Three
and there was no more time left for poetry.
In the morning I will mend Scott's broken poem
make the birthmarks and crows feet
conform to the correct pattern of words
and drive 85 miles north to teach more poetry.
And post this posthumously.
I will tell them poetry is a two-way mirror:
the outside looking in, and the inside looking out.
And we will be ready to reassemble the parts.
(We will invoke David Meltzer.)
What remains, a death on the bridge
and the fact that I will witness two more
fatal crashes in less than the span of a day.
Death is an outsider looking in.
The half moon, a pale shadow of itself.
Tomorrow, a child will ask if the moon is white or bone grey.
Must be a phase of the moon. All bled out, I think.
4/2/2009
the outside, vs outsider prompt. Maybe I'll write one later.
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