Postcards from the Imagination

I wrote this one some time ago. In fact, it may be one of the last poems I finished before my block hit big. I revisited it today because it leans toward one of my obsessions--i.e. poetry as performance (though not 'slam'). This example leaves much to be desired in its execution, but the fact that it's written in two voices is a start. (Note: were I to revise this I'd probably do away with all references to The Waste Land, as that poem has little to do with how or why I wrote this one.)

Nevermind What the Thunder Said

At night she sets aside her dimestore turban,
  slips off a burden
of rings, and plunges her fingers into a hot sink
filled with greasy pots and dish soap.
Even so, there are things Madame Sosostris knows. 

“There are a thousand ways to get it wrong,” she said.
“Like that girl.
Someone told her heaven was a cumulus cloud,
  and looking down,
she guessed the oak’s grey bark demanded penance. 

In her zeal to give back to the Earth,
she carted around a heavy-duty
staple gun, and reams and reams of 20 lb. bond.
     It took three weeks, but finally,
she managed to paper over all the trees in the neighborhood. 

Next day we had a downpour,
and there was pulp everywhere.
Even as Aprils go, it was a rough month.” 

There are a thousand ways to get things wrong,
like insisting on beginning
at the beginning, when prophecies are shimmering
in the numbers of the next highway exit sign. 

But maybe you aren’t driving. Maybe you’re going by
boat, or by train, or by, God forbid, an airplane,
and as it’s huffing down the runway,
you stifle a novena for air, and fret about the life
            stuffed into a suitcase,
                    stowed in the cargo hold. 

Maybe looking out the window you notice
the way distance swallows entire hometowns,
then spits them back out as geometry,
            and you call for a stewardess,
                    about to be air sick.

“There are more ways to get it right than you may think,”
she said. “Like that woman who thought herself cursed
because a lizard spoke thunder at her in a dream.
In the intimacy of the tent she forgot herself and said:

All I really want to know,
Madame Sosostris, is—
Is it okay to go on hoping? 

And when I looked her in the eye,
    and answered,
                           Yes

she simply ceased her disbelieving.” 

There are a thousand ways to get things right.
    Like finding yourself on the verge
of another one of Earth’s everyday revolutions,
        back turned to the twilight
as it wastes out of the sky, watching some magnificent
         constellation gather flesh on the horizon.