The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Fri 12/8/06)

As It Happened

If I do not vividly describe it, you will
think the scene is dull; forgive me
if you fail to believe
even half the story. I know she emerged
from a month's silent retreat at Ban Ban
in love; another temporary monk
from the States, who said he was moved
by the way she blinked
after a rainstorm—yes, he said just that.

If you can believe it, he held her
in mute adoration, and with her, a world
of simple cantankerous things:
crockery exploded by machine gunners
at a local base camp, rounds
hot and hollow as clocks, ticking off
the next reload and another decanter
placed atop the stump; the dead
weight of the courtyard's autumn sump
of wet blue branches; a spot
in the vaults they came to share
in secret, by chance meeting
after the morning rites and special
salted eggs—well, you mustn't believe it.

What Emerson called the eternal
man is dead, that sense of the storyteller
as communal cathexis; it is more
contemporary than that, the mere collection
of coincidences, some creeping to bed
to sleep quietly alongside, others
just standing in doorways. When I tell it,
the two must actually touch,
she must speak to him: a few sultry
and assonant words, which in the telling
break at least one promise.

Seth Abramson

***************

RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

:hi:

crockery exploded by machine gunners


:hi: