Tuesday 3.29: Three New Poems
I feel like I should explain: This week’s baseball gif features pitcher Josh Collmenter’s pet hamster, Slider, who served as the Arizona Diamondbacks mascot in 2015. Slider would occasionally roll into postgame interviews, which was adorable.
The Rays and Dodgers begin the bizarro 2020 World Series tonight (Dodgers in five, if I was a betting man), the days are getting shorter, colder, and spookier, and this week I have three new poems, plus a little note about running.
I hope you enjoy, and remember: “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is about how it doesn’t make any difference which road you take. Either way, you’ll be on some bullshit about how it was special when you get old. Funny guy.
Poems
“Saturday morning”
Spend the day like a piece of fruit.
Settled, reading the ungainly newspaper.
Proceed
like walking pneumonia walking
around Berlin.
I’ll see you when I see you,
weak and quick and fortunate,
mist on the lake
rising and in the low-lying field
rising between the lake
and the central drive.
The old stone fort isn’t taking requests.
The late game is wasting a lot of black ink.
Dawn is constructed
with pomade like a hairdo.
Sleep is a search party.
Circle the hill
in the back of my mind,
looping
like an envelope
or a goose
after the banquet.
“Tempo”
I happen on the group and enter,
like a raccoon
crawling
down a storm drain,
the aroma of breathing and pleasant chat.
They’re unbothered, or unaware,
and the pace gets easy, swift rhythm
of reading.
What has anybody found?
What we love about the city
is the way it decomposes,
regular as a heartbeat and
muddy in wooded corners.
We pass a horse, laughter,
sunlight, and the smell of barbecues,
life and nothing.
What has anybody found
in the lightless
interiors, the black
stuff of us?
“Custis at Alexandria”
The stills of bloated corpses float by like summer—
on summer sounds. On television the war
Lives on dust and summer sounds: crows, cicadas—
Though there have been cold campaigns
The war lives on dust, discomfort,
wool uniforms, distant stench, formal
words that buried the dead
beneath the front lawn,
and still do,
and the house
is still there,
its confused haunted worthless rafters,
full of summer.
America wants to approach true color and character.
To recover the letters, some partially burned, to say,
at least
of course
except
whatever it is
there is to say, something,
right,
Running for money
To hold myself accountable, I’ve taken on a few “virtual challenges” this fall, one of which is running 219 miles—the distance from the Boston Marathon finish line to my apartment in Brooklyn—between September and Christmas, and donating $1 per mile to Running Strong for American Indian Youth. I considered making a GoFundMe type of deal for this, but that seems so narcissistic. If you’d like to donate, you can do so via the link above.
I added four miles in the form of a semi-respectable 8 x 400m interval workout this morning, and according to my virtual calculations, I’m a little less than halfway home, somewhere outside Andover, Conn.