Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Fractures and Fires















The Way Gasps Fracture Myths

The way full-fathom stops
at an interchange amber
silence a freeway acclimatization,
Thus do ears flush residual
microwave background radiation
that was there for Pompeii
that was there for Clovis Man
that was there for removal of your training wheels.

Rapunzel’s one hiccup
grabs braid tangled mid-toss.
Apneatic freeze tag leaving remnants of Grimm’s,
Andersen’s, Scheherazade’s, Remus’s starchy tableaux.
Your president gurgles!
“Read me a story.”
But daddy and mommy and archbishop, Pharisee,
Leader Triumphant,
all left with nothing important to say.
Set bone! Set bone!

The moment of puffed cheeks,
of gills in the bathtub,
is the moment of no turtles all the way down.
No transubstantiation.
No Mostar-bridge troll for a Billy Goat Gruff.
No urgent-care indulgence for a faux blue-faced sin.

But remember,
before pedal hastens to metal,
the very same sup-sup now sucking your myth,
is the gasp that embalms the precise hypothesis
leaving us still-image now now and now
stifling knowledge-tree apple
returned to the vine,
with incisors’ reverse slo-mo healing made whole.
Asphyxiated shamans say it ain’t so.

But lights turn green.
Road roar resumes.
COBE background hiss offers a second lullaby verse,
while storytellers report gainful employment, for now.


Loring Wirbel
March 29, 2011


Reminders of Indian Gulch

An obvious plume over Morrison,
A Challenger contrail gone mad,
but none of the Hayman haze you’d expect
from a season of aircraft grounding.
Instead a Denver of clarity waxing unseemly,
brilliant Arapahoe sunset violating its own loitering right.

"Why are there fall smells everywhere?” Regina asks,
“I’m thinking s’mores and high jumps into leaf piles.”
“It’s the Golden fires,” I say,
unable to erase the image of a ministry building on the Nile
and a thousand other conflagrations from a year of plumes,
a year where fire and water and air
went looking for earth,
while we went looking for s’mores.

Loring Wirbel
March 23, 2011


3 comments:

Ruth said...

This fractured fairy tale poem, Loring. "The Way Gasps Fracture Myths" is such a perfect representation of how things have gotten to be.

Can't poetry just heal things? Please?

I love "Reminders of Indian Gulch" too. Do you have fires starting up? Or did something just remind you in the sky? Great evocation of North Africa. A prayer.

Loring Wirbel said...

Oh, Ruth, it was specific, the Indian Gulch fire was one last week that threatened the area between Boulder and Golden for a while - and Regina really DID make that comment in downtown Denver. We are facing unprecedented drought this year, so wildfires are taking place almost daily, not even April yet. Forest Service very worried about midsummer.

Oh, I have tagged you in a couple things on FB, if you get repeat poems, no need to comment twice, and thanks for visiting the ol' blog.

Loring Wirbel said...

Oh! Re: healing for poetry, it's my journalism background again, and the fact that my favorite poem of all is Paul Goodman's 'It was good when you were here,' which ends:

and to you and me may God grant the grace of the poor,
to praise without a grudge,
the facts, just as they are.

Which implies that description, even harsh description, comes first, healing as it comes along. I subscribe to so many slam-poets and beat-poets who have rumbling anger of the rage-against-the-machine variety, I always think of my poems as pretty happy and droll by comparison.