Wordsworth

This is the day that he remembers,

Standing on the precipice of yesterday,

Gazing out towards the mooring of a ship marked tomorrow,

Laden with dreams disguised for her.

Old Wordsworth, as he seems to himself now,

Looks across at young William

In reflection of the ancient Wye

With Dorothy at his side, sweet sister,

He calls,

And instructs her eyes to see with the mind,

With fullness,

What he sees-

The rolling sylvan hills

Encountering stately spires of birch and maple,

Distinguished apart in shape and color,

Growing closer to touch the more immensely they grow

Out of each significant miniscule bud of a branch.

All this blends together in sight and smells

Of woods, moist earth, and hanging dew

With his meager expectations

That excite his memory

And dull his successive visits.

What he sees-

The opportunity he has lost

That might be regained and cherished anew

Within that other soul

Standing so near,

So close to touch,

So clean a slate to be filled with experience.

Poetry Reading

A man buries his head in his hands

Beneath the bright lights of bookstore wisdom

And rocks gently back and forth.

There is hardly room for breathing.

The college kid who crept in late

Now clutches his pack to his chest

For lack of room or

For fear of feeling too much from what

He hears

And spreading it like a seed

That slips inside ears and noses,

Tickling,

Ubiquitous weeds growing like

Wild fire,

Wild in form,

Function,

Wildly informed of the true face of things.

People sitting on feet and hands,

Arms around knees and waists,

Backs and pants showing

Cracks, but no pulling up, no protecting

The individual from all the other individuals,

Breathing and sniffling and gum chewing

And crooking necks and hanging upside down

Over the stair rail, or stepping over crossed legs

And begging for a better view,

Begging to be involved, connected and protected

By the single solitaire sitting on one’s feet,

An arm wrapped around her knee

And her bare feet pressed against one’s thigh.

A woman’s wheelchair disappears under

Foreign (yet so familiarly human) limbs

Draped over the metal frame.

A cough is felt a hundred times over,

A clap is like the earth trembling

At our unifying giant mass

As it attempts to stand and falls back down

With a tremendous thud.

She breathes in,

My lungs rise.

He sighs,

All our shoulders loosen,

Fall to our sides.

We in one world

Breathe and listen.

His words enter like seeds into the giant ear

Of our giant body

To fester and ruminate in the soggy mess of perspective-

History

Gender politics

Criticism and critical thinking-

How these things so often distort the big picture,

The reality of thoughts, the trueness of feeling.

So we touch our palms to others’ backs

And for a brief time,

His back is our back,

And her feet are our feet,

And the heavy words the poet speaks

Enter our great ear.

We cannot carry such a truth alone,

We cannot discern it separately.

We carry it on our massive shoulders

That heave and sigh as one.