Back from Vancouver. A great time, about which there's much to say but not enough time to say it. Mainly because the fall semester starts tomorrow and I'll be on campus from eight in the morning until eight at night.
Which means here it is, the Sunday night of the Sunday night of the year. And this untitled poem of mine (double spaced here so the line breaks will work, sort of, with any short bits simply parts of the previous line) seems to match, if not exactly to mirror, what I think about that.
Stop moving for an hour, and the hollowness you hear
will be your own mind, its equations, beliefs,
the finer points of political hectoring, all strung up
along a line that comes from far down
and ends in a hook. It’s the silence you’ve earned,
your prisoners, and not much more than a day
with traffic dead stopped at the corner. I listened
to things like that for years, wrapped it up with a little TV,
a federal investigation, some sense of starting over.
But there isn’t much of anywhere to go. A guy in a van
with a rusted roof opens and closes his door, looks at the street,
decides against it. And sometimes it is a decision.
It’s like the story of the duck and dog, how they were friends.
That’s the kind of thing to want, not some pointless assertion.
