Prima

Materia

“My quietness has a man in it,

he is transparent and carries me

quietly, like a gondola through

the streets.”   ~Frank O’Hara

                                                   In Memory of My Feelings

By day, I live my life.

By night, my life lives me.

How can they

weigh the same?

It would seem an absurdity.

I dare to ask

which is more true

or any less fictitious,

a life that lives itself

or the one with

self constrictions?

Asleep I practice letting go.

Surrendering to the silence,

a dormant thing set afloat

in a boat of mulch and ballast;

a laid out Moses 

ferrying forth, 

whose finger steers

its rudder North.

Below are dangers no less real

with dramas more deranged.

Life on the surface no less

more than surgery

performed in a haze.

Like Eliot said

I go then like a patient

etherized on a table

the evening spread out

before me, and myself

a hapless fable.

Tonight I'll meet

my mother wrapped in

a snarling stole,

beside her my twin brother

clutching a shard of coal.

Who will play my father

is anybodies guess

seeing that he's

long since gone,

his memory

put to rest.

Still, that doesn't mean

he'll be a no-show,

as dreamland

invites us all back.

Like the time machine

made from a freezer box,

if death's a fiction

the past's

an immutable fact.

 1/18/22