A stonewall echoes
and I don’t know what I wrote
last year
These inklings are inky,
benevolent.
Halted flow can’t give a dam
It all adds
for the stonewall through the sky
cutting the ozone
to slice in half a life.
Too much thought
blockades a porous memory
You emptied out the garbage
to remember what you ate
Now you can taste.
When I was young I was old
and when I was old I was ageless.
Yesterday a fly died.
Today a grand ceremony is taking place.
Nuns painted the wings with gold and build a mohair coffin
embroidered with holy spiders’ thread.
The President of the President
chose a sea burial off the Indian Ocean.
Huge planes
of the 1970s
boarded everyone as they flew with a fire equal
to eight trips around America.
Children chose a sunflower bed
to float the fly off from a spotless shore.
I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but this one poem actually feels/reads like two. The break for me occurs between the stanzas “when I was young…” and “Yesterday a fly died…” This isn’t intended to be a negative criticism, because I do like the poem, especially the imagery contained in it and the surreal semi-detatched mood expressed in it. I, myself, have a poem featuring a housefly in it that I wrote almost 5 years ago that I may post here in the near future. We’re kind of on the same wave-length in that respect.
If I was to stretch my own interpetations - as you know I’m very capable of going to quite distant and strange places in your poetry - in that constant and never-ending search for meaning - I would say that Nuns is a pun too. But, I admit, I have a fanciful imagination. I simply love works like this - so rich in suggestion.