Author: Gary Lindorff

Dear friends:
I dreamed that the DOE
Wanted to allow radioactive waste
From nuclear weapons facilities
To be recycled by siphoning it into
The single-stream Mississippi of the junk
That gets turned back into the stuff we buy.
 

How elegant is that!
 

But wait a second. . .
That wasn’t a dream.
They really want to do that!
But most of all
They want us to join them
In their psychosis.
If this wasn’t so real
I would seriously consider
Moving to an even safer oasis
Than rural Vermont
To enjoy the kind of world
I want to live in
And let the madness play out. . .
Let our descendents pick up the pieces.
Unfortunately when they are done
There won’t be any pieces,
Unless you call radioactive blobs
That used to be zippers
Fused to blobs of plastic and metal
That used to be assault weapons
Excavated from mounds that used to be cities,
Pieces.

 

Scene: Two old men on an enclosed porch,
Birch Meadows, somewhere in Maine or Minnesota, August 2012:

First old guy: It doesn’t matter,
We’re on this course
And have to finish. . .

What do you mean John?

I took a walk up the hill yesterday.
It was a little muddy for sneakers.
I could feel the chill
Coming up through my soles.
At the top I turned
And was surprised to see
That the sky to the west,
Backlighting the hills,
Was the same intense orange
As the posted sign
In the field.
Instead of heading back down
I kept walking a bit,
Glancing over my shoulder
At the sunset
Now fading to rose.

According to Webster
the first walls were steep hillsides
or palisades utilized for defense.
 

How many walls do we need
To keep ourselves safe
And to secure all our freedoms?
The strongest walls are subtle,
Like the one built by Descartes
Between the head and heart.
And Darwin’s wall
Between the weak and the strong
Still stands against the relentless attacks
Of fundamentalism
And the academic proofs of real science.
The Papal wall between the Pope
And everyone else
Doesn’t seem to have aged at all!
But there are world-class walls
That are not so subtle
Like the Great Wall of China
Built to accommodate two warhorses
Charging abreast.
And Israel is building a fine wall
In the West Bank – 8 meters tall!
A true wall should outlast its architects!
That one certainly will!
A real wall learns from the failures of great walls of the past –
 

wall

 
Life was passing away little by little
into stored memory.
Consequesntly death was becoming less possible;
just another archive
as life flowed back into the sun.
 
It is not at all surprising that
we started seeing ourselves in the sun.
Vision is a ray of transmuting images
with its own wavelength –
a 93,000,000 mile pure stream of imagery
and alongside it
words from life,
like ants,
carrying bits of memory and meaning,
glowing darker toward the growing disc. . .

The back of a man’s head spoke to me
On a metro-bus in Chicago,
A little bald spot with a shine.

Did you know, it said,
That the back of a man’s head is innocent?
No matter what the rest of the man has done,
Is doing, or thinking. . .
The crown comes out first
And is therefore the wisest. . .

(It paused, thoughtfully, as the bus lurched.)

. . .But the back is like the dome
Of a smooth stone pushing up in a field
That knows everything.

It’s a good thing I don’t have lips
Or I would never stop begging the face
To turn around. You see,
I know how the world rushes in,
And how it fills in.
I am the rudder,
The tail of this kite!

There she goes,
Little more than skin and bones
Heading up the drive again.
Twenty years old, kidneys failing. . .
Her body language calls back,
“See you!”
The road is calling.
Crickets are chirping,

 

Dragonflies zigzagging in the field,
The sun is glinting through the tops of the pines
Like a spun-glass bulls-eye
And little vortices of gnats
Are involved in crazy reunions
In patches of sunlight
Over unmown lawn.
Every morning lately, it’s the same:
She heads off into this ecstatic unknown
More than ready to leave everything behind
For that one final act of disappearance
That old country cats are known for.
And I won’t let her go.
But I will watch her make her way
Right up to the bend
Around which I would never see her again.
Only then will I go after her,
Scoop her up,
Keenly aware of the amazing coherence of her bones,
Cooing admonishments. . .
And thus begins our day.
And thus continues my training
For when I try to leave
And the world keeps calling me back.
See if I don’t purr.

Let us bomb your neighborhood,
Let us target your neighbor
Out of our love and concern –

Not you, not your children.
Drones of love!

 

 

Welcome to the Land of No-poetry.
If I succeed in writing this poem
No one will understand me.
It will be like talking backwards.
It will be like autism.

There is no music here,
Except what you buy.

The weather is predictable.
Frogs are two-headed or one-legged
But it doesn’t mean anything.
Up means up, down means down.
Everything makes bitter sense, but what is bitter?
We don’t know anything about that.

Oh, and what is across the street
Has always been across the street.
Where ever you want to go
There is a sidewalk. . .
You have been here forever,
I have been here forever. . .I think. . .

In Zone R
You push a green button and wait for assistance.
In Zone R there are two doors
With combination boxes on the handles –
One for men and one for women.
In Zone R you hear a voice summoning an Associate to Zone R.
You hear this voice every sixty seconds.
In Zone R
A small disheveled man appears
Who tries every combination of numbers in the universe.
(You know that he will fail but you root for him anyway. . .)
In Zone R
You begin to question
If you should wait a little longer
Just because you have already waited so long,
So you wait
Until you don’t think you can wait any longer
But the longer you wait,
The more sense it makes to wait a little longer.
In Zone R
The disheveled man speaks: