WEATHERED
"Do you remember a day without weather? Nobody did,
yet so few people put it in their stories - many
poets put it in the poems, maybe."--Andrew Burke
Walk the perimeter road in this place,
get some worth from overpriced hiking shoes
feed on the delusion I'm preserving my heart,
look at the company spyware:
microwave transmitters,
cameras mounted on poles,
squirrels wearing wires.
I think it is cool absolutely undistinguished
rainless breezeless complaintless
the door is left open for the real life
not of other plans but of your own
attention is commanded for once by
my laughably termed (but I don't have any others)
creative life a book manuscript done, assembled,
the over-50 first-book prize
and the poem I've been asked for about a mother
do it the hard way not my mother who is uninteresting
except to a shrink
pick instead a woman bound for the Army stockade
her picture holding her child the look is not maternal
after all
it is avoiding sad the baby looks like a prop
this is not about me (isn't everything else?) but
I have made it mine I have taken it on myself
Why? I am either a writer
or I have a Christ complex.
Or is there any difference?
KTW/5-11-05
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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