"First Epistle in June" (Frank Gaspar)

March 21, 2008

[photo by Arslan]

“First Epistle in June”

For days now the wind has freshened off the beach
and scoured the airport and the stadium and the avenues,
and cooled the composition roof and the stucco walls,
and dandled the iron chimes on the verandah and
wreathed the moon with vapors: For days
I have waited for signs, I have read the old books,
I have listened for news from behind my bellying curtains,
behind my nodding roses. For nights I’ve stayed awake
counting, trying to drive a stake into the old myths, trying
to see the world in a natural light. For nights I have sat
amazed at all the dangers, so sudden in this calm life,
and after so many small, mean lives of peril behind me.
I confess I am bewildered in the true sense of a wildness.
Sometimes this very street looks perfect, deep in
the deep hours, when the trash containers are lined
precisely at the curbs, and the old newspapers are stacked
for the recyclers under modest bricks and stones, and
the automobiles grin like fattened animals in the false lights
and the true lights. But you can’t let yourself be fooled
by these plankton breezes and blackened streets. I’ve gone out
myself along the rows of houses. I’ve walked to the edges
of the park where the owl lives and the crows in the tall pines.
It’s like watching sand run through a pinched glass: everything
is turning into language, and you can’t keep still despite yourself.
I’m telling you this freely. I’ve sat on the sidewalk
and parsed the gladiolus and the poppy and felt the heat
go out of the earth like a long sleep. Not one of us is safe.

–Frank Gaspar
from A Field Guide to the Heavens

Tags: frank gaspar, poem, readings