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Walter Bargen
Drought Report
She blows in with the promise of clouds.
Unlatched screen doors slam
And keep slamming as if entering
The house once isn’t enough, even
for a drama queen of the locked and bolted .
The silver maples in the yard
Are a riot of leaves
And keep rioting even after the police
Fire tear gas and swing their truncheons.
Civilization bottoming out.
From the porch it’s easy
To hear the creak of branches
And in their creaking, the chanting of her name.
Something at the tip of the tongue,
Just out of reach, just out of hearing,
Beyond any known language.
Clearly she is called and calling.
But what do clouds promise?
Even now the dust deviled
into anemic swirls is exhausted
Laying down layer after layer
After each passing car.
The ditch-weed leaves
grow stratified with million-year-old
limestone─ paler, powdered,
fainting or buried into another life.
Centuries of Snow If it snows enough,
We won’t have to be here. We’ve been here an hour
And we are still thinking this. We drove our versions
Of icy roads and pulled Into the parking lot,
Wiper blades unable
To clear away Our visions and revisions. Windshields encrusted,
We retreat into our shells. Calibers of snow as deep
And concussive as we can aim. Arms too tired to throw more away. We harbor longings
For white out, for erasure, Without thought, within thought.
We are our own little dictators. Is this what Stalin meant,
Condemning Mandelstam to be “preserved and isolated,”
His poems surviving
Only through his wife’s Siberian memories. His friends executed,
Unable to write the regime
Real enough.
Snow blind,
We sit at our desks.
© Copyright, 2014, Walter
Bargen. |