Ten
O’Clock Poem
It
is now ten o’clock in this poem. Snug
in
this poem teenagers are just waking up,
their
parents getting hungry from breakfast,
but
can’t eat as they don’t want to spoil lunch.
The
hardware store is opening and hanging
snow
shovels outside the poem’s window.
It
is now ten o’three in this poem, the teenagers
have
checked their phones and gone back to sleep,
cats
wait outside their doors yearning to be petted,
as
the parents are too busy thinking about not
eating
to pet them. It is then ten o’two in this
poem,
because it is a poem and does not adhere
to
the trifling laws of space and time, and though
it
should be read in order, it does not have to be.
It
is now a time long before this poem was written
and
I’m reminding you that you haven’t read
this
yet—as most people never will—or that maybe
this
is something the teenagers are dreaming about,
or
maybe it’s a deep and longing growl in their parents’
bellies,
or maybe it’s just something ethereal that only
cats
understand as they dig their claws into light
peeking
out from under a closed bedroom door.
Matthew
Hammersmith was a Jellyfish
It
was a matter of survival, she thought, putting crayon
to
paper—a sun setting behind a brown house with a whorl
of
smoke looping out the chimney, a chestnut tree, she
thought,
like that tree that was there where there is nothing
now,
and the deer—how beautiful and sad and tentatively
stepping
in the spiky green grass, it’s head alert and crooked
to
look off the page, through thick purple lines of rain, past
the
thorns, furious and twisted around the blue fence. That
blue
fence was like the sea, she thought, resting her eyes on
it,
the slats waves on a beach before the moon comes and
the
wolves emerge from the forest and the fish whisper to
each
other at the sand’s edge; and then a man, she thought,
in
a cowboy hat and big black boots smoking a pipe, he
sat
on a rocking chair just then and said to her let me tell
you
a story about a guy named Matthew Hammersmith. Who’s
Matthew Hammersmith? she thought. Well, let me
tell you.
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