Sunday, December 21, 2008

pome 812c, in which our hero writes letters to a lesbian who has recently had her heart broken:

i heard this song out of
mind in a
different time you were
there still it was
cheerful painted walls in
far-away cities it was
like a fever-dream and the
skeletons in the
closet were alive

but i
thought if we
went out for
tea we could
no, okay, maybe not,
but anyway it was almost winter,
the music was making you
high the soft
beat of it all the
spot on the sidewalk where my
beer bottles fell out and smashed and
mixed there with my
blood in the
rain it was
all so quite
certainly
something

and we were so
beautiful then and we
knew we
could get
old and
lose sight of things it
was the
space where
it all was open
ended and had no
consequence the
moment knew us and gave us
everything and we
squeezed the
pulp from it and we
rode a bike
straight down the hill
shrieking into
parc la
fontaine and the world
laughed and the
rainclouds at night-time
rejoiced.



now:
i envy others their
children and the
fears they might
no longer have
as those who
now live for something
else and
i know what everyone means when
they say they
wish they could
live a thousand lifetimes since
one is nowhere near enough to
cram in all the endless beauties and
possibilities and i

think the next time i
see your
dad i'm going to
ask him whether
he would agree that
particle theory insists on the
separateness of things whereas
string theory
suggests their
possible unity.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Incredible... but what an obscure conclusion...
-Friend of cara's

cara said...

delicate and lacey

the conclusion weighs it down, or sews it up, I'm not sure?

either way great poem.

Lorne Roberts said...

well, friend of cara's, and cara...

the conclusion actually got added as a random bit of note-taking i had done at the bottom of something i'd written, and then when i went to edit the piece of writing, i thought... hey, why not just fit this in somehow?

i guess the idea, though, was to tie in string theory, and the possible unity of all things, to the idea of a possible unity with someone who at first i might not seem to have a 'connection' to.

TheBlueMask said...

It was a hard read for me. Took me a few times to get in the verbal groove. Now I'm in it- great work!

cara said...

the ending did make that connection.
it just sounds different.

Anonymous said...

Very cool. Obscure, but cool. Thanks WB and cara!
- f.o.c.

Lorne Roberts said...

to me (and this relates to Blue's point, too) it becomes less obscure when you hear it rather than read it--

i tend to write for a speaker's voice, and not so much for a reader's eye, if that makes sense.

i.e. this piece should be read.

out loud.

by me.

then the phrasing all makes more sense, and it actually (i think/hope) becomes a bit more narrative, and less obscure.