Thursday, July 15, 2021

It Would Have Been Dark but Not Lugubrious


I promised myself I would post this flag if I didn't have to post the Napoleon Emergency Alert photo this morning
>> Deleted bleggalgaze <<
I mean, I could have told you this true duh about whitechristers since 7th grade in 1972 but I figured you knew
>> Deleted bleggalgaze <<
What I can't talk about about work, I have strong colleagues, we know we are dishwashers, thank us the fuck for the dishes we washed wearing masks interacting with strangers wearing masks, you tell us there's no money to thank us I will vouch for only me but you thinking it money means you think me no more than a dishwasher
My second, seventh, and in the teens job was dishwasher at Roy's Place
>> Deleted bleggalgaze <<
Is the universe open-ended?
Dan reviews new novelBlogospherePhereblogosBlog about recent readings
Thom Gunn's Letter's From America
I'll speak only for me summer lull. It has not been hot by DC standard but this last week of HEAT INDEX 100, we're dragging, the black cats are dragging, I could have told you about Future Farmers of America and my view of the American right since 7th grade too.
And we hadn't seen Nap in 36 plus hours, turn on the Napoleon Emergency Alert System Earthgirl asked, his old man's heart misbeats, back hips arthritic, multiple meds, he's as stupid as I am thinking he's twenty, I said, last night at ten, I have to wait 48 full hours for it to work, watch, he'll be here in the morning, and look, no Napoleon Emergency Alert System today
Insideriest joke ever, even I almost didn't get it, deleted
WOKE UP WITH BELOW IN MY HEAD, have I ever mentioned I love Archers of Loaf?




THE MISSING POEM

Mark Halliday

It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been
fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child
saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter,
something strangely like what your daughter or sister said once
if you could remember. The child's voice flies across
a small parking lot where, in one of the cars,
a man and a woman sit listening to the silence between them.
The child's voice probably hurts them momentarily
with a sense of beauty apparently very possible
yet somehow out of reach. In the missing poem this is
implied, conveyed, transmitted without being flatly said.
And it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field
after a game—the last three or four players walk
slowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked,
one player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls—
the players seem to have known what it was all for
yet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there
at the field's far end; and a block away on a wood-grainy porch
the eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows
in each passing car, as the poem recalls what she wants to recall.
Hours later the field is dark
 
and the hills are dark and later even Firehouse Pizza has closed.
In the missing poem all this pools into a sense of how much
we must cherish life; the world will not do it for us.
This idea, though, in the missing poem is not smarmy.
Remember when you got the news of the accident—
or the illness—in the life of someone
more laced into your life than you might have thought;
the cool flash of what serious is. Well,
the missing poem brings that. Meanwhile not seeming like
an imitation of Mark Strand or Mark Doty or Mark Jarman!
Yet not like just another Halliday thing either.
Instead it would feel like a new dimension of the world,
the real world we imagine. With lightness!
With weight and lightness and, on the hypothetical radio,
that certain song you almost forgot to love.

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