May 29, night
Travel promotes nomenclature,
no recourse to candelabra
in the lists, rather
a long unraveling panorama
and inexact editorials
standard in the standard editions
collected as occasional critical
writing, odes to buds
soon to bloom, where divestiture
by the appraising body (father
and mother both reward trauma,
intolerant of unsupported conjecture)
results in half-hearted petitions
for something more cerebral
or less resolutely corporal, farther
along that inevitable trajectory
that even now stretches,
palpitating, like wrist veins
strained from exertion,
informed by bulletins arriving
from the east to strategic retreats
in select areas of Vermont.
Meticulous attention
results in the growing ascendancy
of screens convinced of their erotic joy,
and the malign power
to which we cede sway presides,
opulent in our absence,
not requiring candid photos
or confessions in this
amoeba-like resurgence
of community and unconvinced
requiting. Like the
trail
in the grass the turtle left
in its wake, its risen head
a phallic prow jutting into space
and leading the charge, we escape
even as we arrive and vice versa.
Parallel courses
are at times less fractious
like bits of seasoning
that ignite the taste buds,
a bombardment
striving to amass destruction
from so many sites, a flowering
of debris and bodies finding—
dust clouds in the desert—
a swift metamorphosis.
Was it not as you would like,
the tropical ambiance, the skittering
targets you may never hit again,
the candid denials like shadows
on stone, unyielding, cool.
You wanted one urge for union
to remain pure, tattered
though it must be by fallible passions,
vulnerable to memory, mood, timing.
We were here, weren’t we?
©Donald Brown 2010/2013
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