Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Unfinished Poem
Pigeons of New Jersey
Crowding the cracks & ledges in the chasm
of the Great Falls of the Passaic
below the footbridge where Dr. Williams
& Allen Ginsberg looked down at mossy boulders,
the rising mist & mulled over
the consequences of Hamilton's America.
On the Atlantic City Boardwalk,
the bigshots who strolled here,
Capone & Trump, & the Irish girls
flocking to the sea from Philadephia,
my grandmother in Nineteen-Eighteen
throwing popcorn.
Get a certain distance into a poem & realize it's dictating an idea rather than bringing the things. But fragments can be put to other uses.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Crowding the cracks & ledges in the chasm
of the Great Falls of the Passaic
below the footbridge where Dr. Williams
& Allen Ginsberg looked down at mossy boulders,
the rising mist & mulled over
the consequences of Hamilton's America.
On the Atlantic City Boardwalk,
the bigshots who strolled here,
Capone & Trump, & the Irish girls
flocking to the sea from Philadephia,
my grandmother in Nineteen-Eighteen
throwing popcorn.
Get a certain distance into a poem & realize it's dictating an idea rather than bringing the things. But fragments can be put to other uses.
Labels: poem
