Wild Waters

Poetry is an evil thing

because it lays so flat

that wild waters can over

top it to flood the town

where I grew up until no

church spire or cement

Yankee statue standing on

a column can break the water’s

surface.

I SCUBA down and follow

a fish that looks like Nixon

into a covered bridge that

long ago burnt down.

Inside a cartoon bubble I read,

“Your President is not a crook!”

Maybe not, but poetry is an

evil thing because it lays so flat

that wild waters can over top it

. . . with ease.

FG  January 21, 2014

My lame commentary.  There are two steam shovels clearing the overgrown sides of our canal here in Chong Khae in anticipation of another flood.  This makes me antsy just thinking of the floods of 2011 (as if Thailand doesn’t have enough problems).

If poetry is an evil thing it’s because we’ve made it so by neglecting it and by demanding that it put on odd, ill-fitting clothes of the rhyme and sensibilities of long dead ages.

Poetry was once full of exalted language that rose and soared, but now that bird dog will not fly. Poetry lays flat.

I love to see old pictures of Goffstown, but I feel ill at ease in romanticizing it or my short time there.  The years, at any rate, have brought so much static between me and the town that I can no longer hack my way back though to the place.