Been fiddling with this poem for a while. I still consider it far from done, and looking over it again just now, again made further changes. The proverbial work in progress, start, stop, start, stop, repeat.
I like very much where it’s headed, though I wonder with it if I’ll ever feel quite like I got there. In any case, as I said, it had to be said, even in these constant forays of renewed effort …
this has to be said
Spraying above her, into the gloaming
broad sweeps, unfettered arcs, lines
welling and crossing, as if writing
a passionate letter, the way people
used to.
Leaning in to the hard uplift, trying
to stand, the roof of a building, dusk
and no sunset, within sight
of the woman, the same, naked except
for her clothes, her one arm
piercing the sky, uncapped
spray paint, more at her feet, madly
shaking the one, its rat-tat-tattle-knocks lost
to the wind.
Safe within my distance, I stood
yelled to her why, sometimes
it’s all we can do. My voice flew
with the paint, the woman still
silent, completing her sentence.
I am explaining what’s wrong, what we need
why I care, her voice the flat color
of a patio chair. I have so much
to tell, what we must do, things
we must change.
This has to be said.
My prayers never work, never reach
where they’re sent. They fall back like
dry rain. I will let the sky explain. The sky
will relent.
I believe this what she said. But then
the wind. The wind
shapes us all, takes more than we give.
But the paint – I am shouting –
the paint isn’t sticking to air enough
to make clear what you wrote there!
She was freckled in specks, unnatural
dots, a chaos
of constellations, nearly obscured
in slate-metal blue. The sky
can decode
whatever it needs to. The sky understands.
When next it rains, a biblical
drowning, my words here will flood this unquiet
town, running down into rivers
drains, lakes, into oceans, back up into
clouds, washing truth into everything
heaven allows.
She spoke, what I insist
were her words, plumes of blue mist
blown into her mouth, truth
obscuring her tongue.
Except that none of this happened – how
could it have happened? – though I know
that it did, because I know that
it must. In this age of whatever passes
for true, when the nighttime sky blinks
like unblemished chrome in junkyards
of orbiting scrap, glinting in outdated lies
about stars, when a wiener dog can be untied
to the shape of a balloon, what difference
does it make if this actually was?
I might tell you it makes a whole
world of difference. And I would tell you, but for
this mouthful of paint.
The wind sometimes can change, and we
who are standing, upon roofs above
drains, choke on our words, so strong that
they taste. We rooted blindly
in place, pleading with nothing, with
unimpregnable space, with
our time, with the air. Pleading without
so much as a prayer.
– FWR, 2020
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