The following is a revision I did over the past two days of a poem from entry 741 that for some reason got mixed in with the earlier blog entries I’ve been revisiting:
Poem Ventures North-South
One morning, Poem set out for the north-south.
Never having gone precisely there before, he hoped
the change would shake him out
of the null zone he’d been too long in.
The sun was halfway to noon,
when he rippled into a locked gate,
“Prose Poem,” engraved on it.
Straight through the gate, Poem strode, that element of him that
was fictional not for the first time being of advantage. A few dazed
steps later he realized he’d come to a corner of his final telephone
call to his father–the one Poochie, the little rubber dog his father
had given him one birthday, daily merged more completely with.
From the Shell station across the street, now long-abandoned, rose
some aria from La Boheme. Many slow clotheslines later in China the aria sank in a suburban Chinatown alley’s moonlit Drunkenness.
Poem would surely have left at that point had one of the gas pumps
not unworried a carton of Camels (his father’s brand) into something resembling cherry-blossoms. From them, the aria from La Boheme re-emerged. The shadow it cast resembled Roman legions–from when
Rome was still a republic.
Is it any good? Who knows?