Brigit vacuums and blocks the door,
Her back is turned to me.
Do I wait, or go, return upstairs?
She looks! And jumps ten feet.
The leaves are golden limey brown
As I descend the stairs.
A TV van is parked outside:
A creepy-looking lair.
Beneath the overpass that runs
Above the winding road
There lies a stain of whitish grey,
The birds’ great unload.
It lines the sidewalk like the scene
Of someone’s tragic fall,
Has blotched the pavement many months,
Will do so till snowfall.
I give the wrong directions to
A passerby from France.
A man corrects me straight away –
I can always count on chance.
At Luigi’s Italian diner chefs
Are Transylvanian-born.
I’m ignorant of that region other
Than Dracula and porn.
And thus wraps up my afternoon,
The chips are fully eaten.
I know you’re jealous of my day,
It surely can’t be beaten.
---
---
This poem did not come to me easily in terms of material. I was straining hard for content and went for a walk with my notebook to seek inspiration. I indeed walked up behind a woman vacuuming and blocking the door, knowing she’d jump 10 feet if she turned around and saw me, indeed saw a massive splattering of bird droppings that almost reminded me of some cordoned-off forensic scene of a freak accident. The actual ballad vibe is unfortunately not there, although metrically it basically conforms, at least to the meter of Coleridge’s canonical ballad Rime of the Ancient Mariner. (We also had the option of blank verse, and I’ve already done that with my Bali Pastoral, a rather stiff poem that I do like both for its packed, colourful details and personal evocations.) Mundane Autumn is sort of funny and random and it gives me pleasure that I wrote it based on a half-hour of experiences on a Saturday afternoon. I admit that the final stanza is a dud, and that the ballad aspect is lacking. I originally planned on completing the third part of a very long ballad inspired heavily, all too heavily by Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Here’s a sample:
An engineer withdrew his gun
And aimed it at the glow,
Which charged with sonic might and knocked
Him to the ground — too slow!
An afflicted engineer He trailed the glow with neutered will,
succumbs to Resistance disappeared;
bizarre activity. We waved our hands and begged he stop —
His deference was weird.
He skulked into a room and sang
A hymn we’d never heard,
Vociferating like a mad,
Enraged, suffering bird.
We studied with amazement grand
This mockery of man,
Deciph’ring how to fathom him,
When half of us straight ran.
We flew from orange spurts that zinged
Through air engorged with screams —
Some tripped! — these victims were betrayed
By surging starry beams.
I spied the exit to our ship,
Illuminated blue,
And groped through shadows down the ramp,
I swear this all is true.
The docking bay in which I hid
Was brimming full of spears
Of flashing purple speckled light
Refracting throughout mirrors.
The astronaut And through the flashing spears there spun
experiences an A lavender blanket of calm:
aurora in the midst Aurora tranquil fit for scene
of the calamity. Of beaches with sunsets and palms.
A soothing cool diffused through skin,
I breathed in healing rays.
The more I drank the fount of light
The more the warmth did pay.
I pictured worlds colliding —bam!
And all reduced to dust.
The stars withdrew into the womb
To nurse at nature’s bust.
The dreams These fancies of suspension formed
are interrupted. Elixir awesome, whole —
But loud commotion ripped through dock
And heightened peace it stole.
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