03-30-2017, 10:22 AM
(03-30-2017, 09:58 AM)Todd Wrote: That's a wonderful poem, Ray. Thank you for posting it.
Oops! And then I screwed up and posted over it.
But here it is:
Palindrome - Lisel Mueller
There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
—Martin Gardner, in Scientific American
Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the anti-world
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:
Things I will need in the past
lipstick
shampoo
transistor radio
Sergeant Pepper
acne cream
five-year diary with a lock
She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.
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Things No Longer There - Billy Ramsell
I gcead do Kobus Moolman
Poor deleted Tarragona, our city of bonfires. Our city of casual drug use and vinyl
that’s been consigned to the archive of snow.
What what what’s missing, what’s conspicuous by its absence from the main square
and its tributaries: the future perfect or future continuous?
I can’t find that beautiful thing you asked me for. I can’t find my memory of making it.
When that device was triggered in Placa del Pi at first no one noticed anything. But
then the different parts of speech began to shrivel and petrify, to disappear completely;
interjections, measure words gone within a fortnight.
We’d open our mouths to utter them but nothing.
Shortly after that came the battalions, marching in ebony lockstep across a border we’d
misplaced, had long ago forgotten ever existed.
They just appeared one Sunday in their expressionless squadrons, they appeared like
chimes solidifying in their obsidian fatigues.
They occupied Jew Hill, the barracks, the Generality.
By then all the hard-edged abstract words had rotted, had grown incontinent and squelching,
as the canker advanced with terminal facility from diamantine epidermis to pulpy interior.
No plums anymore.
When they come they come in the predawn to confiscate recollection, targeting random
apartments in the sour-milk light, each wears a xxxxx helmet.
No sausages. No xxxxxxx. None of those lavender-remembering pears I’d bring in baskets
for you every October.
They’re unscrewing the street signs on xxxxxxxx and xxxxxxxx
Your clean, cedar-hinting scent, your scent of xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx I can’t find my memory of xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx they xxxxxxxxxx can’t xxxxxxxx
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions