The Weekly Flashback features “retired” poems, most of which I wrote between 2001 and 2002. They are pieces that, for one reason or another, I will no longer be working on. While I don’t consider them “finished” pieces, I’ve decided to share them in their “final” form.

MOOD MUSIC rolled out of my head in Milwaukee, winter of 2001/02. I was getting off of work in the morning, walking out of the restaurant I cleaned when I saw an old woman waiting for the bus. She smiled at me in a way that made me think I reminded her of someone. I got the sense that she’d lost a son some time ago, and that he was around my age when he died.

MOOD MUSIC

I woke to snow and some song
of losing love or death or both,

and thought of the last two funerals
I’d missed. Later, I swallowed some

of this melancholy in front of an old woman
at a bus stop who thought of her son

when I passed, the one who’d died
at twenty. She wore it in her eyes

and a trembling hand that snug
her coat collar tight.

She smiled when I smiled because no one
smiles at her much these days,

convinced I was an angel, had been sent
by one in the light of that day

to smile and share some warmth
before we all pass on.

I don’t mind a part in someone’s play
so long as results are fair,

and later she finds me waiting the way
she waits, takes me back

to my grandmother, buried,
the way she smiles hello.

–

Read last week’s flashback.

The following poem, THE UNTHINKABLE, was something I wrote back in summer of 2001. I can’t remember the exact prompt now, nor am I sure to what the title alludes. I know that the only poetry I read back then was Bukowski, Ginsberg and Kerouac, which explains some of what’s going on in the poem (I think). All I know is it’s unlike anything I’ve written in the last four or five years – that’s not to say it’s worse (or better, for that matter), only that it sticks out as an older voice.

THE UNTHINKABLE

When sky falls,
earth shoots roots
toward morning,
air bends light
with sound,
migrant geese
make moans of whales
at midnight,
cabin doors in storms
flap from ends
of piers,
hands near fire
touch love’s lips,
taste flowers
near graves,
the wind, the essence
of ginger
and peanut oil,
pimples roused
by suggestions,
the life of first
and final moments
before
the unthinkable,
the spot of autumn
dying,
the moans of migrant geese
are whales
at midnight,
air bends light
with sound,
earth shoots roots
toward morning
when sky falls.

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