Written by
Marvin Bell |
Gray rainwater lay on the grass in the late afternoon.
The carp lay on the bottom, resting, while dusk took shape
in the form of the first stirrings of his hunger,
and the trees, shorter and heavier, breathed heavily upward.
Into this sodden, nourishing afternoon I emerged,
partway toward a paycheck, halfway toward the weekend,
carrying the last mail and holding above still puddles
the books of noble ideas.
Through the fervent branches,
carried by momentary breezes of local origin,
the palpable Sublime flickered as motes on broad leaves,
while the Higher Good and the Greater Good contended
as sap on the bark of the maples, and even I
was enabled to witness the truly Existential where it loitered
famously in the shadows as if waiting for the moon.
All this I saw in the late afternoon in the company of no one.
And of course I went back to work the next morning.
Like you,
like anyone, like the rumored angels of high office,
like the demon foremen, the bedeviled janitors, like you,
I returned to my job--but now there was a match-head in
my thoughts.
In its light, the morning increasingly flamed through the window
and, lit by nothing but mind-light, I saw that the horizon
was an idea of the eye, gilded from within, and the sun
the fiery consolation of our nighttimes, coming far.
Within this expectant air, which had waited the night indoors,
carried by--who knows?--the rhythmic jarring of brain tissue
by footsteps, by colors visible to closed eyes, by a music
in my head, knowledge gathered that could not last the day,
love and error were shaken as if by the eye of a storm,
and it would not be until quitting that such a man
might drop his arms, that he had held up all day since the dew.
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Written by
Sasha Skenderija |
Deep and unreachable in their darknesses,
capriciously childish and tender
when we write to each other,
while we talk about one of us
who is not around.
I grew up with some of them,
others, who I met as grown-up people,
I could unerringly pick out in their photo albums
on group pictures of their school classes.
They've always been like that.
They remember every detail I've ever told them about myself,
and even some I left untold.
There's always one of them around to remind me
of important things about myself
when I sink or soar too high
in my petty existential delirium.
Some of them had nearly given up on themselves
and on me: they fell in and grew together with their own lunacies pulling me and lifting me up
as a magnet picks up iron filings,
or a comb torn bits of paper.
People
that I love,
scattered along the meridians
and along their abysses:
among monsters of normalcy.
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