Sunday at 1 is my time for study - one Carrie is instructor of a poetry group up at St Mark’s now I’ve dropped Vonne the life-writing instructor.
At last Sunday’s class, one of the four women (men: two) said of my ‘Christmas Trees’ piece:
It gives us plenty to see, but there’s not much that’s relational - trying to make out your partner there…
I laughed, saying: when my wife hears this she’ll agree. Marilyn says to me: Don’t show me your poems about things, I want them to be relational.
Went home and told this to Marilyn...
So next morning with a great effort I began with a thing and… [best wishes from Max]
The Globe
for Marilyn
Wandering Seattle idly
on Pike - or is this Pine? -
next to the tattoo shop
and its welcome sign:
No Pets. Must be
18 & Sober
I pause with my dog
outside the thrift store:
for fifty cents - no more! -
I should buy this globe,
carry it home from
the tea-trolley piled
with sad remnants here,
this out of date world -
the late Soviet Union,
colonial south-east Asia! -
remember exotic
French Indo-China?
All colored nicely
before it faded,
which adds to its charm.
My hand is longer, larger
and lumpier than these
mottled Himalayas.
Tibet! hello and
goodbye. How well
does it turn on its
metal poles? - this relic
of twentieth-century
earnestness, left-over
curiosity -
creakingly, rustily,
precariously. Still,
you feel your power -
let the whole world spin!
What stable base is it
fixed to? Turtles all
the way down? Sadly,
no, a tin disc almost
heavy enough to
prevent disaster,
not quite. World tilts,
equator first, off
and down - only I,
quick-reflexed Atlas,
clutch, clasp and lift it
back to the trolley.
Apocalypse not now.
I see myself, loaded
with it, puzzling the dog,
entering our flat -
Darling, look what we’ve
brought home for you!
a useful ornament.
And hear her Not here,
not now, not near me.
Kitsch so bulky she
fancies not one bit.
I linger over my
hemisphere, the South,
relegated almost
out of sight by the
crowded busy North.
Down under: Australia
seems all desert, New Zealand
two blobby islands -
two towns, no harbors.
In the scheme of things
that’s all globe-makers
could offer, back then.
I can’t go home, wherever
home was or is, unless
it’s where she is for now
in our tidy flat-earth flat
all day today and some tomorrows.
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