Kevin's Watch

here's the piece i was spouting the other night in chatbox Avatar, i post it here for your perusal...



Dim River


The long awaited rain arrived,
spun me down
into some river dream,
some water wheel spoke of a girl,
some slipstream velvet calm
where I muddied up and floated,
muddied up,
no thunderstruck, no lightening fire,
just a mindful mist, eddying out,
dew mist, unbreathable and slick
under my bare feet,
felt like wet clover,
felt like some lost summer,
some gone by where the leaves turn over
backside up to the tears, to the gray blanket,
and I put my toes in
and tried to walk the dams the kids built on the curbs,
tried to make branches and tributaries,
tried to get in up to my chin so I could
hear the leaves change color, but
the downpour downpulled at my wet dress
and I slid forward into a public pool,
smelling like Coppertone and hard cold Hershey Bars,
and smelling like the way my Mother laughed
when I launched myself off the deepend,
and I sputtered and coughed
and spit chlorine,
into the breakwater,
into the dim undertow
of the dim river dream rain.


II


The windows positioned themselves in rows
and stared me down,
and I blinked back the dim river
and hollered out my count at those
numbered pigeonholes,
those vacant, dingy open and shuts,
pressed my hands against
the cool, clear lining of my heart
and chanted chanteys to the shades.
"What do you know of the dim river!" I sang,
and the windows glinted and winked and shimmered at me,
up to my knees in the tap dancing,
up to my heart in the rain,
"We stand tall atop one another, they said,
we view and reflect and our surfaces
bead up with moist diamonds,
and the sun will come and eat them."
And my lungs began to fill with their mockings,
their understated emptiness,
and the bank eroded and crumbled with me,
into the rapids,
and I foamed and fumed and spun gulping,
no wading, no puddlejumps,
just a vague notion,
like when the sand empties into the glass,
and I opened my eyes under the green water
and held my breath and touched bottom,
where silt and skeletons lay in drifts,
and the dim river gushed
into the deep blue,
and I came up gasping, onto the hard deck,
hauled myself up and rode the swells like a bull rider,
whooping and yelling, rode high and fine,
licked my salty lips and pushed into the spray
with my arms outstretched and aching.




III


The gulls cried to me alone,
their arcs and hoverings bordered me,
fixed me in a swim toward the delta,
and I pushed upstream, into the beginnings,
into the currents, past the shallows,
past creeks and bayous,
toward the place where the sun bakes the ground hard.

It is a desert where the dim river washes out,
and the sky is cloudless and the color of blue topaz,
and saguaro arms hold me,
and my feet are not native,
landscapes beyond the white salt flats,
no pin oak, no snowfall,
just a hot dust, settling out,
landsculpting layers of silver sediment,
dry and articulate,
and a thumbnail sliver of a moon
sings coyote hymns to my wanderings,
paints the rocks and fills crevices and formations.
I am thrown over planes and hills
and blown into valleys,
like sage and bone and hard grains of memory,
and scattered over a peninsula,
where the fog closes in over me
and I sit, on a bench,
3000 miles west of the dim river,
waiting for a squall.


IV


A pigeon bobbed up to me
And, winking and blinking his red eyes, said
Do you remember the wingwords
of a late summer cicada,
pastures of fresh mown sweet grass,
the first frost, crisp November bats
flitting from limb to limb,
the taste of curbfires on All Hallows Eve,
the quiet crunch of your small foot on snow
in the winter, woodburning darkness,
the dogs, shivering and barking over backyard fences?
Well I have a sparrow cousin
who swears he saw you 3000 miles east of here,
sitting by a spring window,
listening to the nine pin game of the old men in heaven
and waiting for a downpour.

Yes, I told him, that was me.
I was there behind the screendoor, watching a dim river,
I heard your sparrow cousin singing and thought he was a mockingbird.

Wow, it sure turned out to be long.

Very interesting style...I prefer some bits to others, but I like it on the whole, and some great imagery.

Thanks for posting.

--A

Luci knows of my opinon on this poem. But for others, I like it!

thanks compadres...appreciate the appreciation!

Flight to New Orleans
December, 1996



Imagine seeing the heart clearly,
(when it used to be a ghost town),
like light , moving through two panes of unmarred airplane glass.

Before I knew of air travel I could sense a flight plan forming,
could smell it, like a weather pattern building up
against the banks of my southern river,
coldfronts in my father’s house,
runways inlaid with pieces of my mother’s broken heart,
tornado warnings in my brother’s eyes,
and when the storm hit I flew up, without license,
without instruction, into the crowded nightstreets
looking for lovers and strangers to reflect me in the wet pavement,
to position me in the blackness, tethered, as I was,
by invisible threads of nothing to nothing.

I saw life beyond me, the shape of it,
the perfect cinematography of steam whistling from a boiling kettle,
the heavy pulse of taxicab traffic, the mottled flesh of a blood orange,
and I craved what I could not touch in myself like a ghost
who does not know she has died,
and the geography beneath me never changed,
never moved me, and I was twisted into thin lines like neon,
colored only by the fragile glass around me.

I filled the log book with names and
kept track as best I could but
whole pages turned brittle and yellow
and I tired of the plot, thickening
like a forgotten stew on a cold stove,
and more’s the pity, I found I was hungry
and could not, as my ectoplasmic self,
consume enough vice to forget how to breathe.

I dropped altitude and banked over New Orleans,
a parish that was used to inclement weather,
living below sea level, and beautiful decay.
I re-entered my body at thirty-three thousand feet,
over the Atchafaylaya Basin, when I saw the golden,
risingsun ribbon of the Mississippi,
winding it’s way toward the delta,
and as my heart settled back in between my ribs,
I was aware that I was no longer afraid of landing.

I still think this is your best, Luci. Not only is the imagery great, I liked working it out and being close to the mark on what it meant. Great poem.

thanks Loremaster. means a lot to me that you like it.

Those are both really, really good. Very visual - almost like being there.

thanks Captain! i was trying to get you there...if it even halfway works i am happy. communication is the idea! dig?