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
