Bus Full of Dinosaurs, and: Great Pine
- Bus Full of Dinosaurs, and: Great Pine
Bus Full of Dinosaurs
We loved to turn the page and see the bus full of dinosaursand say, “This is not the bus to the park!This is the bus to the Natural History Museum!”Hilarious, over and over,twenty years ago when my son was little.
Because its inviting of sympathy is coercivelittle is one of the words you’ll need to dodge in a poemalong with nice, delicious, excellent, gorgeous, sublime …
How many more such memories can bubble into consciousnessbefore the sublimity factory ceases production?Just say they flare up now and againduring our coercive mass transit to extinction,gorgeous for a second in the dark.This is not the bus to the park. [End Page 72]
Great Pine
The great pine at the far end of the yardis still there tall and waving mildly three waysin ambivalent April breezesjust as it wasan hour ago before I sat down to be studiousabout the different romanticisms of Shelley and Keatsas regards the attractiveness of the eternal Absoluteand my brain eddied into lost brackish side marshesuntil indeed I was asleep, misusing my lifeas I have so much misused my life being a foolunable to take in the fact that today is
departing forever and yet as if no punishment for thishas been scheduled in the rhythm of thingsthe great pine out there waves mildlyno less encouraging than an hour ago! [End Page 73]
Mark Halliday teaches at Ohio University. His fifth book of poems, Keep This Forever, was published by Tupelo Press in 2008. His essays on contemporary poetry have appeared often in Pleiades and other journals.
