As soon as the dawn like a chamois
Cloth, has remade the windows,
Our mute hero has tripped into view
And his wide gaze swings in periphery,
Hands already on the silver wheel,
Upon all that is old and all that is new.
All his steps in the dawn are immortal.
He walks on the light film of their sleep
While the day falls down in sheets his
Footprints on the new lawn are protocol.
The red shutters on the house are
Dreams. The tan, pebbled driveway
Orange seashells, tiny conches,
Trivial memories . . . Now he
Turns at the familiar signpost.
Meanwhile, nowhere, on the unstained
Rug, the cats are tearing around, all
Kansas, and one house on Hinchey Road
Awake as the sunlight releases the corn.
And the afternoon will be a flash flood.
The sun is yellow like in a child’s picture.
His black tires lacerate the highway.
A sleeveless arm reaches for the blur
Of trees-- Rip, rewind, retake!
Morning is blue, there must be a mistake.
Oh, in the summer the girls were supine
On the the blue metallic roof where
The the world was reversed and he was opine,
Wearing a badge on his sleeveless shirt.
-------- Part Two
As soon as the noon with its pincers lines
With steel the edges of his broad rimmed view
Our hero rides, next to his thermos, and
Nature humbly follows on her haunches--
The Blue Sedan west into yesterday.
The casual road under telephone wires
Tends toward the forest of tents where
The memorable people of Hinchey Road
And a girl from Kansas, no doubt, run about
With hoops that rise blue in the noon,
Fall around the skirts of childish trees
And a message races garbled in the trees,
A thin scream backward on the modern wires
That deeper still within his gloom
Inevitable youth has just dove forever in
The blue-rimmed eyes of a clear lagoon.
Onward into the speckled leaves,
There is a hush over Lake Quintessence
As a bottle of blood floats into the sun,
While under a similar sky
The famous cat had a sparrow for lunch
And morning was a blue suspense.
-------Part Two, Again
Stranger than that his past is a postcard
On the white vinyl or a glimpse into
The rear-view mirror, waving her arms come
Back, come back and walking the children--
Bang, the famous screen door and the sky are
Now closing shop. Painting the fenders bluer
Than March, color the rest as you wish.
Headlights dance on the twilight snow,
How many winters ago?
By the criminal stream far from Hinchey
Road he abandons his car and memory.
But the strident dreamer strides onward
And here silver glass marks the frozen mud,
The tire is in its natural rut and blue,
He looks up. Headlights bend about the maze,
Snow dancing backward coaxing the eye.
You abandon a car in one century
And turn off the headlights in the previous.
Now in the midst of this fiction, bowing.
The clown steps into the circle (luckily)
Reading everyone’s favorite poetry:
The trees are laden with this man’s sorrow,
Under a broken bridge go colored leaves
Like blue medallions upon a pure stream
Leading like time to the waters of his heart.
-------Part Three
No sooner has the night, stranger to any
Tale, reduced this recondite fancy to silver
(Moonlight on the shield of a racing sedan),
Than the blue man took pencil in hand.
Sitting cross-legged on a rotting stump,
Or somewhere in Kansas in a flashflood, he
Penned in staunch pines, straightforward lines:
“Had I not imagined your sleep was real
(Little man was I, scurrying across
The oval lid of erudite dreams),
I would not have braved the world when I
Knew so well how fragile how meek the sky
Seemed at the indigo border of road and yard
With my thermos, at the age three.
It was then I discovered the place I’m
Now, the marvelous creek and yellow sun
And the curious off-rhymes that my mind
Ascribes to the symbolic world of time.”
This accomplished flight across meridians
Space and time, allows our hero afterthought--
Coincident with the ravishing moon
On his chin, wheel, automobile. His wide
Swing raced the drops of cold dew on spring
Lawns, where his spirited footsteps are made
Anew, as credulous man and his blue sedan.
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