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Contests : Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2007 : Commended
EXPLAINING THE D TO YOU
It sprouts like bindweed or rattlebox
across a field and covers anything decent
between us,
like the seasonal burnings
where only smoke and ash exist
over the once fruitful yield.
The harvest will rise
wihtout us, or perhaps,
despite us.
The geometry of barns
equates a mathematics we choose
to forget. The geography of orchards
gives in to the need
of the wild.
For, the love of space and distance
develop into concerns of the now
and the next now. Stemmed
from the retraction of words
too late to unsay—
do you understand?
No,
you are too young or else
not a poet caught between the word
and the experience. All the love we once owned
curls away like cast-off wire-wrap
from brown boxes pushed underneath
a sleeper sofa, where hairs
from a much-hated cat
still bed between the cushions.
The six years we suburbed
on the outskirts
of Atlanta, the six days
of sun-burn from from the last
summer we stayed
at the Grand Floridian,
sipping tea with our own Alice,
and my new loft on Sixth Street
across from sixteen acres
of almost infinite IKEA,
where I spend free
weekends walking for furniture
to relax and rejuvenate my body
in front of my new
theater view digital TV. But,
this experience feels flat
like breathing fog. Messes up
the tidy sums of things:
yours piled there, mine here.
We make the personal public, property
of our mood. We redo our wills,
change our insurance.
Like jazz, we swing
from dream to reality—
how obscure! and Coltrane us to the despair
of a melodramatic saxophone, cheap scotch,
and take-out tacos. When did our lives
become a Pollack painting?
When did the currents of love,
the electrons of the heart,
atom into a suffocating bomb
imploding us
to silence?
This poem won a Commended award in the 2007 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Tom Howard Books. Author M.E. Silverman received a $50 award. Winning Writers assists this contest. Copyright is reserved to the author.
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