Читать книгу Common Sense - Ted Greenwald - Страница 11

P.S.

Enormously difficult

To explain exactly

How I feel

Clearing my brain

After seeing

Where I’m going

After resting

After taking care of this and that

For another round of works

Finished one thing

Found a solid voice

(Temporary, I’m sure)

Time to lean back

And think about life

Roughly halfway over

(Over what? Water?)

Very little

In the way of theory

Cropping up (like grass)

More and more

The time turns to practice

The sense of unity

I feel should be somewhere

I guess’ll be there

Long after I’m gone

And someone else

Looks back on all this

And talks to me

Across the ages

With me talking

Through my poems

Up to a certain point

(A hundred, two hundred years)

Language (the ass) carries

The burden of meaning

While after (say

Around five hundred years hence)

A flipflop (oops, a pothole!)

The meaning carries

The language

By then (like me)

Changed beyond recognition

And to think

This doesn’t even require

A grand plan

Although, if I recall correctly,

At one time

I thought it did

And had one

Ready for anything

Nowadays I’m more or less content

To let a lot

Of things take their own courses

Like amiable rivers

Making blue lines

Down the map of history

I’m not saying

That some things

Don’t infuriate me

They certainly do

But I’ve learned

Mostly through stupid repetition

The same patience

I apply to my own works

Moving them out of range of good and evil

Is applicable

(In a romantic way, I guess)

To things (natural and unnatural)

Outside myself

I’m on better terms

(Though still able to bear grudges)

With most things and people

More sociably amiable

(No longer stand

In a corner at parties

Facing into the wall

Smelling the school-like plaster

Getting plastered)

Now I talk it up

And even when down

Never talk down

But remain subdued

Fve learned to like

Winters more

But hate the end of same

Feel relief at spring

Crave sun on body

Enter through the lobby

Of annual depression

Have greater sense of

Personal comfort

Expanding horizons

Ability to survive

(And know how far I’ll go

To do)

In this year of famine

And pestilence

Have learned

To keep my mind and ear

Cocked (like a gun)

For the true poetry

Of the language to go off

And fill

The sky of the mind

With angels conversing

And have

Enough memory left

To remember

And write the angels down

Without pinning

A single body or wing

I have finally

Returned to the cheerfulness

I had when very young

Before the bubbles

In my personal seltzer’d

Gone flat

When the fingers of school

Having opened my thinking cap

Kept the bottle open

Long enough

To let the fun out

Amidst a multitude of others

Asking one way or another

‟Whatever happened to you?

You were such a cheerful kid”

And that I am