by Adam Penna
Do you too doubt the comet’s crown, coma and nucleus,
Its brilliant leavings’ “au revoir, remember me,” because it
Exhausts the math you memorized, regurgitated then forgot
For images and lusts more central, warm, immediate,
The messy spring explosions of the cherry blossom spray,
The ghostly first impressions the forsythia bleeds through a fog?
It’s possible to practice any death, so every death is real.
Can life defend itself so well from life, or must it
Divide its heavens from their hells. And then two people
Share one body, one blood, one nervous system and one brain,
And every metaphor fits snuggly in a never-ending chain,
A detail topping a wave’s crest, performing somersaults,
As if time, gravity, facts of every variety, as trivial as pain
Without a purpose, change discovering only reflections, everywhere.
I know I’m lucky, a grey ghastly grizzled ghoul. I scattered seeds,
Broadcast great arcs and sweeps of love, and need
No more attention than a bird gets for birdcalls,
The reassuring antiphons, the cardinal spouse, as close
As sound, and, twice as bright, her chips, her vow, her chime.
Come home, is prayer and hope and not there to be touched,
But psalms, let go of me. The river swims inside the minnow stream.
My hair is longer than it’s ever been, and when I wash it clean,
It feels like someone else’s hair. I don’t know where I end.
Adam Penna lives in a rich man’s house fronting a magic spring and on the edge of a murder gorge. He is a father to 6, and a husband to 1.
