When I Hear Their Names, draft #1 September 2nd and 3rd, 2024
about them or about their stuff (someone will tell me
it's just propaganda, and maybe he's right) it's like all the water
in my cells start to turn the fractal patterns of snowflakes
and it's gloaming on the farm and the clouds are castles
and the light- Caravaggio, and I'm with Sport late at night
and I write-
Mostly just things that dribble down the side of the barn
when it's raining, not like a river, rushing and sure and wild
but focus on getting somewhere- to the big ocean.
I'm just a series of little droplets meandering my way down
an old rusty roof, and I remember making a wonderful sound
when I landed and split apart, and I head down, down
to the ground, which is in view now, as I creep down the side
of a barn door.
But it's when I hear about Achilles' rage,
Hamlet's sorrow, or Odysseus's desire for home,
that I become like an old tired tree
my rings, so many variations: thick years and thin-
the droughts, the years of plenty, that one year, 536 AD, with no sun,
I feel all the rings expand and contract with each breath
and it is inevitable, I will leave you and go to the earth,
but only for a moment.
