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By Thomas Lynch Submitted by Kirk Date: 2003 Aug 01 Comment on this Work [[2003.08.01.20.48.8201]] |
| A blue bowl on the table in the dining room fills with sunlight. From a sunlit room I watch my neighbor's sugar maple turn to shades of gold. It's late September. Soon... Soon as I'm able I intend to turn to gold myself. Somewhere I've read that soon they'll have a formula for prime numbers and once they do, the world's supposed to end the way my neighbor always said it would - in fire. I'll bet we'll all be given numbers divisible by One and by themselves and told to stand in line the way you would for prime cuts at the butcher's. In the end, maybe it's every man for himself. Maybe it's someone hollering All Hands on Deck! Abandon Ship! Women and Children First! Anyway I'd like to get my hands on you. I'd like to kiss your eyelids and make love as if it were our last time, or the first, or else the one and only form of love divisible by which I yet remain myself. Mary, folks are disappearing one by one. They turn to gold and vanish like the leaves of sugar maples. But we can save ourselves. We'll pick our own salvations, one by one, from a blue bowl full of sunlight until none is left. --Thomas Lynch, Poet and Undertaker, via his collection of essays "Bodies In Motion And At Rest". He says this was one the only standalone success of a method he has of breaking writer's block. The method is to write a poem on 1. an inanimate object in your home 2. something you see outdoors 3. something from the daily papers 4. something from TV, possibly also pick some arbitrary poetic structure to adhere to. |