Dave had a most amazing poetry reading on Thursday. Great crowd, well-known poets and some members of Fishtrap were there. It felt like a big night to me.
I recorded two poems but am unable to upload them to this blog b/c of their size. So instead I've included the last two poems Dave read. These were the two poems people were talking about afterwards. Go Dave!!
MOANS AND MOMENTS
My neighbor stands in the rain and yells at his garage light
that it’s not raining. You see, the light blinks in code whenever water
hits the bulb. It’s been blinking all night. No one knows what it’s saying
except his daughter who swears it says, I love you.
Some nights there really is no rain when it’s raining, but the light blinks
anyway. You don’t know that the rain wasn’t rain until sunrise when,
even if the sky slumps pregnant on the ground, any buckets left out
overnight are dry.
My neighbor’s wife, asleep, moans in their house. Their daughter moans
at the same time. There are three moans really, because
his wife also moans in her dream, though only she and the man
in her dream hear it.
The daughter’s up late watching a movie on a three-inch screen in her hand.
She also writes on that screen, and because of spell check she can’t spell.
Once she left a note on my door. I had to ask what it said. To her, words
are characters bunched together that mean nothing. What matters is emotion,
and you can’t spell emotion, you can only sound or show it. Her mother
shows emotion for the man in her dream with her moan, and even though the man
in her dream isn’t real he knows this emotion. He’s a composite
from pictures her mind took all day when she wasn’t looking.
But her moan is real, and almost convinces the man he’s real too.
Out here, where everyone is awake but her, she doesn’t know
her moan is mixing with the rain that some of us don’t think is falling.
I know about the moan because I’m awake listening to her husband
tell the light it isn’t raining, even as the mist collects on his head.
Eventually I’ll go to bed. I’ll make up my own people. When I wake
I’ll walk outside into the wet fuzz my neighbor says isn’t rain, but rather
calls a veil that separates us from other sides of ourselves.
He likes to share his philosophy about the veil over beer on nights
when the rain is so soft you swear the stars and moon are out. It’s like this:
when you dream about a man you’ve never met, it’s not that he doesn’t exist,
it’s just that he doesn’t exist here. You’ve slipped through another life.
That’s how it rains when it doesn’t, how a girl can watch movies on her phone
and be the emotion of the moan she’s moaning, and a woman can moan
in her dream and her sleep, two moans at one time in two places. Everything,
he says, is the same moaning moment. That’s why buckets stay dry in the rain,
how stars and rain can be out at once, how light cuts through so fine a mist
that you’re sure the mist wouldn’t exist without it.
THE FATHER AND SON
The turnpike, the Northeast Extension, the Schuylkill express
to Philadelphia – whatever he called those roads, they all meant hell
to my father. If he could have gone his whole life without driving them
he would have been fine. When I was 12 there was a monthly drawing
in Atlantic City for a million dollars. You had to be there when they pulled
your name to claim it. Up to him we wouldn’t have bothered, but one time
I said the right thing, flipped his switch and convinced him to throw
another five-bucks in the tank for a four-hour, pre-dawn ride to the shore.
His knuckles were blanched wrapped around the wheel, from the semis,
yes, the minivans on either side, the retreads that bounded and bounced,
but from the day of week just the same, the week and month and entire year
that he’d been out of work, laid off from the plant that hired him fresh
from the Army, where he’d worked up to an office and desk in the back.
Forty-years-old, and he suddenly didn’t know what he was doing
with his life, was saddled with three sons all in various shades of his likeness,
a roof that leaked, a swimming pool in the yard that did the same and no idea
how to make it go, find a job and be the father who said the right thing.
So we drove in silence, no radio, just the hum of tires and heavy sighs
he made when someone passed too tight to the car, all the way
to New Jersey. Still morning when we arrived, we ate omelets at a place
near the boardwalk and held that same quiet until I started talking
about whatever drifted in my head. I told him everything about girls,
how you can actually smell sun in their hair, and after a while
they start to shave under their arms, and you can’t grab their legs
at swimming parties unless they let you, and some even let you swim
between their legs but then close their knees when you’re half way
so you know they can drown you if they want. And sometimes clouds
take on shapes not by accident but because they’re angels that follow you
around, and on the ride I saw Jesus, beard dyed white, blobs of sky
for eyes. I taught him the right way to drink cocoa, to let the whipped cream
melt like an island going down then sip slow because every island is unique
and when it’s gone won’t come back.
Finally we walked to the arcade, entered our names and waited until
they pulled the winner. We didn’t win a thing that day, but drove home
with the windows down, the radio loud, and had enough gas and sunlight left
to head straight to Lake Winona, where I pointed out
that the smoothest stones that really skip across the surface get that way
after years of being rushed with water. If you grip one just right, give it
a good flat flick, it’ll bounce all the way across.
Dave, they are beautiful.
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