Whenever I read poetry, I feel like I should be in a coffee shop,
sipping some economical friendly brew,
wearing a beanie,
and sporting dull, fall colors.
On the first day of class, Rob Larson wrote En Medias Res on the blackboard.
He preceded to repreat the phrase .
He then added "You will have understood...You will have understood.... That sounds so funny...You will have understood."
I googled the term "en media res" from class and discovered the Paul Gibbons' Poem entitled:
"Fugue: En Media Res"
So, grab your coffee - and take it in:
Fugue: In Medias Res
A goat stood in the wish of crickets.
Lichen blighted the rocks in moonlight.
Sleep was walking the sun back to morning.
Isabella wouldn’t bathe until the Moors left Spain.
Stay with me now: it was not an unusual night
until, out of the darkness, the goat,
tired of being still, put its back into it.
Isabella stopped walking, in the middle of the goat’s bray
beginning. At the city’s center, the fountain was inviting. . . .
Centuries later, there were goats chained
to the deck of a battleship. A voice
counted backwards. Men shuffled on goggles.
This was not a drill. Crowds of photons
were busy deciding: wave or particle?
Then, out of the darkness, they put their backs
into it. On the ship, some goats were separated like a series
shaken from The Interpretation of Dreams.
Others flowered as though through a kaleidoscope,
which is to say, not unlike Isabella staring at the moon
and contemplating her God’s plan.
There was the question of how a body will react
to such light. Of how cosmos blossoms inheriting dusk
can go unnoticed. Of freshly opened scents drifting
first from an orchard, then through the colonnades
of L’Alhambra, where the Catholic queen stood
drying her calves. Her attendant paused under the orange trees,
one hand holding linen, the other soap.
It is the same two-handed pose a man will strike
in a shower near the Bikini Atoll in 1946
where the distance knocked orange and violet.
He’ll have seen the rising brain expanding its ripe folds
lit like dirty twilight above the horizon.
But this man who was there would remind you
you only have to find the
door and you’re home,
you only have one more river, one more angle
of incidence to prove that there’s reflection.
Watching light come apart in his beer glass.
Or through the hide of a goat. His cancer
has spread like the blight of lichen
on the rocks in moonlight. He is so tired no night
is unusual. Each morning walks sleep
back into him. It’s how he stays with you.
He has stepped into a river that
Heraclitus said is never the same one twice.
In the middle of things.
And the goat that stood out on a night during a siege
in Granada sired generations of gloves,
milk, and then test subjects
for a derelict ship in front of light so strong it tore
their bodies cell by cell. And to my friend
who recently named his second child Isabella,
It is not the same river. He bathes her with his brain fiery,
his hands steady as rocks. Stepping lightly
around her coos. Never tired of being,
he puts his back into it. He thinks the next time
he will add a spur of lavender to the water.
Perhaps a new sweet soap that runs
the hands without a second thought.
He’ll put a kaleidoscope to Isabella’s eye
and the crystals blown and fused from sand
will not be a drill. The light will wrestle down the tube
to the child’s eye, will strain through the retina
and run separated shadow from color, or nearly so,
and then will dash through the optic nerve
to the visual cortex to mix again as
oooh and aaah. Which is what a man with cancer
is reduced to. I’m sure he loves
the clean whistle of her skin, of Isabella’s skin
after the siege, still the middle of things beginning.
I bolded the last line, because I like it.
And for once... I am not going to make my own smart-alec opinion of it.
Only, because I think it's deeper than what I can display on blog.
So... it is what you believe it to be.
And that's how it should be.
