The Buzz and the Glow
- The Buzz and the Glow
Buzz
They sell whole machines now with fountains and smells and six varieties of white noise for beside your bed. I had a friend who could meditate in the silence between the beeps of her alarm clock. She got fired and moved to the ocean.
They put John Cage in a sound-proof booth and he could hear his nerves buzzing and the noisy plumbing of his blood. That's funny.
Even far away I listen for you and not just the phone or the way you make a door move.
Glow
The sun makes light while the moon only reflects it. So what? It's the same for Venus each evening and morning and we are not supposed to visit there the days being too long and the clouds full of acid and high winds but why need to stand on a thing that is so beautiful to watch? [End Page 23] Somewhere the earth is only a little blue star a thing that comes between this rock and that rock in the long dark sky.
When I fell in love with that woman next to you on the bus you were not surprised at all wearing your half smile that morning.
William Winfield Wright was born in California, educated in Oregon, New Hampshire, and Arizona, and now lives in Grand Junction, Colorado. He has published in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Field, Permafrost, the Ninth Letter, Phoebe, the Seattle Quarterly, the South Carolina Review, and elsewhere.
