Two Poems
Thin
How anything
is known
is so thin-
a skin of ice
over a pond
only birds might
confidently walk
upon. A bird’s
worth of weight
or one bird-weight
of Wordsworth.
Kay Ryan
Subway Seethe
What could have been the big to-do
that caused him to push me aside
on that platform? Was a woman who knew
there must be some good even inside
an ass like him on board that train?
Charity? Frances? His last chance
in a ratty string of last chances? Jane?
Surely in all of us is some good.
Better love thy neighbor, buddy,
lest she shove back. Maybe I should.
ItÃs probably just a cruddy
downtown interview leading to
some cheap-tie, careerist, dull
cul-de-sac heÃs speeding to.
Can he catch up with his soul?
Really, what was the freaking crisis?
Did he need to know before me
if the lights searching the crowdÃs eyes
were those of our train,or maybe
the train of who he might have been,
the person his own-heart-numbing,
me-shoving anxiety about being
prevents him from ever becoming?
How has his thoughtlessness defiled
who I was before he shoved me?
How might I be smiling now if heÃd smiled,
hanging back, as though he might have loved me?
J. Allyn Rosser
Wow! Loved the Subway poem. How unusual for me to love that poem. What’s going on here. Are you having some sort of influence or something?
Comment by chris — March 22, 2005 @ 10:30 pm
I’d never heard of Kay Ryan, but I love her description of her work from the CS Monitor’s site:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0825/p25s01-bogn.htm
“a self-imposed emergency,” the artistic equivalent of finding a loved one pinned under a 3,000-pound car.”
Wherein are included several more of her poems, this one seeming of our times to me:
The other shoe
Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.
If the undropped
didn’t congregate
with the undropped.
But nothing can
stop the mid-air
collusion of the
unpaired above us
acquiring density
and weight. We
feel it accumulate.
Ya listenin’, W? America? No?
And few have nailed the lasting, toxic effects so perilously ignored as did J. Allyn Rossiter there.
“Thin” was briefly up by itself, and arguably thinner for the isolation. “Seethe” gives one good reason to go back and re-read “Thin”, which in a way contains the seeds of “Seethe”, and vice-versa. Nice post! Thanks!
Comment by amplified — March 23, 2005 @ 7:56 am