Skid

Blue Garden

Blue Garden A dog tied to a parking meter should never give up theorizing the curve in the continuum where space becomes time and time becomes a big bowl of grub. A poem should be able to say that in one word but maybe that word is zypxtflo. A poem should be a window and breaking the window behind which the mannequins are made of springs, headless, pendulous, full of sex just as gladiolas are full of sex and the ferry terminal. A poem should be a noise then it should know when to shut up. It should be naked in the rain or nearly so. A poem should be all gussied up for the funeral. There should be dirt tanging the air and pings as shovels hit the dirt. It shouldn’t be afraid of the repetitious dirt. Within reason: personal anecdote. As the rain wetted her dress, he thought about Balboa which was one of the ways we knew something was odd with him. A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus. In the cafés, all the scribblers should stop upon the word THE not because there’s nothing or too much to follow but that the the that the the seems like a turning note of such importance 18 to the roundelay, whatever’s next can’t possibly be so drenched in revelation. Then again. A poem should resist the intelligence and Wallace Stevens almost successfully. Never put an éclair in a suitcase or a poem. Friends may be included the way air is included in a bouncing ball. Suffering, naturally, but no one should die. Make that almost no one. A poem should not be talking. Gliff through sometimely canoe. In a poem called “Blue Garden,” forget about the blue, the garden as indication of the unavoidability of loss and failure. Ouch. Sadness tastes like aluminum, joy like crystallized ginger. Zypxtflo. Zypxtflo. The truest endings are abrupt. 19 ...