Heading Towards a Line from Lynn Emanuel’s Poem “Out of Metropolis”
We’re headed to a stack of paper we call a reem
We’re headed to a stack of post-its we call post-memory
We’re headed to a stack called a chimney and no geezer in Red (the season notwithstanding)
(Also, a stacked deck …)
We’re headed to The Yellow Submarine–and hopefully not The Red Subjugation
We’re headed for the polls and poles–
We’re headed to the stars–no, I mean, Mars
We’re headed to post-science
We’re headed towards heading but not heading off idiocy
Further, unless we find “good trouble”
We’re headed for empty-headedness
A Pantoum with Two Lines from Bishop’s “Sestina”
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
And the child draws another inscrutable house.
The rooms remind her of a tidal cove
with slippery slimy scuttling things.
And the child draws another inscrutable house.
“This not where I reside but it is my home
with slippery slimy scuttling things.
Salt water more then less. Occasional ripples.”
This not where I reside but it’s home
to shards of shells and sandy muck.
Salt water more then less. Occasional rippling
over canopy bed and bed clothes.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous
–to shards of shells and sandy muck.
The rooms remind her of a tidal cove
over a canopy bed with curtains closed.
After Stevens’ Snow Man
an abbreviated glosa with Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
I think of that nothing as air
or the vacuum of outer space
(though we see it’s stuttered
with planets and stars).
One must have a mind of winter
we hear, to get nothing, how
it’s as blank as a mother. As
breath. As latitude.
I consider nothing as I bow
To regard the frost and the boughs
as a sympathetic zero.
As Stevens’ jar on a hill
in Tennessee. As an ibis,
cockatoo and hoary flamingo
on the pine-trees crusted with snow
