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About The Poem
I get very dreamy, especially on those long, gray, cloudy, windy days when it rains on and off, or drizzles, and I'm sitting in a classroom having that certain spiritual aching. I can't explain it, which is why I write poetry. This was a high school poem, and I remember which room it was in. We were on the second floor, overlooking the roof of the gym, which always had shiny mirror-surface puddles on it. After school, my buddy Jim and I used to go downtown to the Yale campus, where we played pool at one of the colleges (pretending we were Yale students, and we got away with it). The Yale University campus is beautiful and cosmic in many ways, including the little courtyards full of ivy and green bushes that sigh when wind blows through them and beats on the leaded glass windows.
I always write to a soft, underlying jazz line that goes its own way, almost like a cat walking. I write, and the words and syllables walk. Sometimes they stop to give a shake, or lick a paw, and then they walk some more. Ususally my poems are short, sometimes fragments. I never think them up ahead of time, but I just run with the mood and improvise. I do a little editing sometimes, just a little syllable or a space here and there, but once it's on paper that's it pretty much.
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Interplay
Green expanse,
shimmering glass
roof.
Wind there is,
water runs
nowhere.
Glimpses:
Cherub face
vanished in water;
Age-green watery metal fixtures:
Victorian cherub, youth,
green with age, what is this vision?
Trees, over the flat roofs away,
green and young beyond wetness
in wind.
Cherubs: trumpeting memories,
Nautilus shells filled
with tomb ash and yet
green leaves
scrubbed and dripping
in cleansing wind!
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