The Search/Starting Over

please ignore the double spacing between certain stanzas--it's blogger; not me.


Part One: The Search

I’ve written it before,
but can’t remember where--
the constant nightmare.
Call it anxiety?
Or vision?
There’s writing everywhere:
on flash drives,
on a variety of websites,
in a shelf full of notebooks,
in a brown accordion folder
that’s torn at the seems,
top and bottom
so when I reach up for it,
pull it out from its shelf,
pictures and poems
invariably fall over me,
covering the floor.

this poem is two poems:
the anxious search for missing words
(the discs of poems from twelve to twenty
that i rescued from a powder blue storage unit
flew east with and lost at my parent’s house,
some of which are on the internet,
some in notebooks,
some in a filing cabinet no doubt
down a dark empty hallway
at the pratt institute
where i was accepted but never went
and still others lost forever
and maybe for good reason).


the other poem,
the one i’d meant to write--
about this vision
or nightmare,
or whatever you’ll call it.

what you might call it,
if you were a diagnostician
is
post traumatic stress disorder.
the clumsiness of those words,
they catch in your mouth,
your heavy tongue struggling to spit them out.
i was there yes,
but we were all there.

most days it feels like 
what's always been,
even before that day.




Part Two: Starting Over


this poem is nothing like
that obsessive search.


in this poem,
i’m riding my bike,
or walking.


it’s late fall.
cold. crisp.
the sun is shining brighter than bright
beating down really.

sometimes it’s in a car,
the windows rolled up,
the air turned off
and the heat of the sun
magnified through the windows
as I sit in the passenger seat
and angle my head to look at the vast blue
above the speeding car.



there is so little to see in 
this blue mix above us,
i’m told is mostly nitrogen,
an inert gas,
split only by the crack of lightening
to feed plants
and charge the soul.


what little oxygen there is,
we breathe slowly,
in and out,
and in and out,
and in.


and suddenly
in that vast empty blue
a plane in the periphery
catching up
to plain sight
and the contrail behind it
stretching for seeming miles.

at the center of my vision,
in car, on bike or foot,
the plane stops,
there at the center.

everything stops,
but i’m watching it unfold,
and for seconds that seem like minutes
that seem like unending forevers,
it hangs there,
mid air,
its contrail,
its vapor trail
behind it,
the sky still blue and empty.

and then:
we begin again,
all of us,
sudden movement,
the shock of what was seen,
the plain falls straight down,
this sudden change of trajectory
unlike anything that’s come before,
an awful right angle forming with the
curved earth below,
this sleek tube suddenly no more than
rock or bird-shot goose,
a bowling ball
or a feather.
a dropping pin,
silently, inevitably
meeting the hard earth below.
an explosion of fire.


and where once time stood still
now only the rush of what next?

Charles Imbelli

2010

the place

the place

that friday in class,

the year the city shook,

and buildings fell like cards

from the sky,

the stop motion cinematography

of it all,

we sat in class

full of joy and fear,

shaking with the anticipation

of our afternoon release,

the beer run, the paper cups,

2.5 days of freedom.

three beers in,

we sat on the bench

outside the skateshop,

darkness falling over the city above,

alone in our sunken reverie,

hidden, mostly, occassional glances down,

but otherwise ignored.

i looked up

to see the stone wall,

the rising iron gate,

the roof, just low enough to reach,

remembering trees

and molded rock walls,

hexagonal steel and playground’s rubber mats,

of climbing and hanging,

running across the courtyard

my feet on the ledge,

arms pulling up,

legs reaching out,

one hand on the roof above,

and the graceful heave.

the roof was empty,

black tarry segmented waves,

undulating for seeming miles,

and there, at the far side,

stacked bricks on pallets.

i touch them,

and loosening one from the top,

look out over the side of the roof,

see them laughing, smoke rising above them,

the weight of the brick in my hand,

the white of it leaving me, arcing pattern,

tumbling through the air,

shattering on the ground below,

too drunk to aim at much,

the energy of that lonely rooftop,

the secret place within

the city around us,

and nothing but laughter

at the swirling pieces,

scattering at their shocked feet,

hiding,

silent, shaking laughter.

That place stood empty

for so many years,

and finally,

transformed by time,

reoccupied,

I stood in that same courtyard,

full of circling newness,

a roof top no longer ours,

only to look up

and wonder at the loss.

Charles Imbelli 
2010