Showing all posts by ronhenry

I pretend I don’t know how all this will end, how its final line will fall. Not 
so much “story,” but a closure of sentiment, gesture to an imagined reader. 
(Read: “me,” right.) I have always nursed a dislike of narrative in poems,
like I’ve always resisted knowing where my life was going. The end is in 
the beginning & then I go on, sure. And despite me, my life has gone on. 
And despite my petulance I, like a poem, create my own end. I’m spewing 
“I”s again and again from my worry, pretending I’m not afraid I have somehow 
already drafted an end. Now: Breathed the wrong air, touched the wrong 
package. Does some figurative reader have an eyebrow cocked with 
dramatic irony at my meantime dithering? Meantime: the chemical reaction 
between angst and suspicion is a slow burn, I think, anger that I trust I can 
wrestle down and subdue daily. But it can’t work forever. Watching a TV drama
I was desperately jealous of a character with a punching bag in his apartment. 
Fuck the future, thwap. Fuck endings, I want to punch my finale, knock out my end.

Someone standing for someone else in a dream. (I admit I have
a bias against people talking about dreams, for the most part.)
My morning often starts these days waking to bird song in gray darkness,
maybe having to get up and trudge carefully to the bathroom
only to find myself awake after and staring toward a vague 
out of focus ceiling once I drag myself back to bed.
In the dream all my belongings seem to have stood for someone
so I felt great anxiety about having lost things while traveling.
That’s all I can remember. That, and I’m in a car with empty luggage. 
In bed I start to warm up under the covers, feel the suffusion 
that maybe means I can get back to sleep. There was more 
to the dream, of course; hell, there’s more to everything.
Every lost moment fractures into a million lost possibilities, 
every bird’s flown off into the crepuscular morning, and gone.

Remembered dream: we are in great hall or auditorium, walls
paneled warmly in pine, typical folding chairs in neat rows. 

Before the assembled, a figure rises up. Its body is glass
shining and transparent. And full of stars—brilliant, hypnotic.

Look through its shape into a vast jeweled darkness and see
the dance again, the tiny planetary shadows cast one body to another,

subtle shades passed across each vastness of space
no one else in the endless crowd would, could, possibly notice.