Poetry
What It Has to do With
Jon Powell
This could be the season love flew to heaven
on the wings of eagles
like the Mesopotamian god Enki six thousand years ago.
It could be the stuttering indeference of Mozart,
offering to change his concerto from d to f
to please some wandering
conductor who resembled his father.
Someone to fear & loath, love & fear.
It could be hollow reeds & willow leaves
floating on a stagnant pond. Turning silver & brown.
& sinking
to that other world. Off or down or up. Redundantly.
& yet—what is this longing that slashes @ us?
This turning inward
& then outward; reap & then sow. The scatterings
we do w/our lives
over & over & over. Punching the same old jukebox numbers.
Voltaire or Vic Damone or Gilgamesh could be sitting
next to you in an airport bar
Who would crack a smile of recognition first?
It has to do w/journeys. Leaving & never going back.
Never arriving. Never finding the way. Never knowing
which path you're on.
It has to do w/St Ursula & 11,000 maidens on their holy trek
& finding martyrdom @ the hands of Atila.
Antiphons & psalms. Vespers & matins. A responsoria
for the lost & doomed & dead.
It has to do w/highways. An endless droning & tumble & fall.
Pilotless shuffling by those stumbling in & out
of our lives.
An overture by the inept languishing poolside.
Ordering the free drinks & bitching about the service.
It has to do w/highways & getting lost for 2,000 years
because the map was scribbled over so many times.
Scores of unknown tracing w/stubby pencils
endlessly & endlessly & endlessly
blurring the original roads & overpasses & exits.
It has to do w/highways & centuries of the dispossessed
slouching to another nothingness.
It has to do w/highways & the bodies of the impaled
left to mark the way to the coliseums.
It has to do w/highways & simfonias written for
wildflowers growing @ a child's grave.
It has to do w/highways & the temples of the insane
built from ashes scooped from the crematoriums.
It has to do w/skimming off the top & looking down the well
into the cold black center of the universe.
The cold black & bleak view of the mountain we all
call home.