THE SPARK

Flicking through a photo album from

When I was a boy, why are they no help

to me now, I want to make something

imagined not recalled?  I hear the noise

of my own voice, mumble.  Sometimes

everything I write with the threadbare

art of my eye.

The school photo looks formal, is that really me?

Seems a snapshot, lurid, grouped, paralyzed

by fact, all’s misalliance.  I flick inside and try

to let me be, on a wall with my cousins

Buncrana, Donegal, I think. 

 Black ‘n’ white by a flat in England, looking

as if I knew, a happy child at x-mas, with

brothers and sisters, I don’t know them

from Adam but they were family, looking

back on those days does nothing for me.

Photos are nostalgic moments of magic but

I can’t see the past looking back at me.

I know I was there in my infant smiling face

Now I’m a man living disabled dis-grace.

There is no way to paint this, it is what it is.

I see something dressed in a matinee coat

I think I caught my mother’s eye and that’s

Good enough for me.  

CARVER REPAIRS THE CRACKS 

IN THE DAM

I am a writer that I decree

I am as mad as mad can be.

I am a writer totally blind

Not wishing to see but find.

To society I’m useless have

No need, push my food

Under the door to feed.

 

When it’s snowing I think

Of Chekhov, Joyce, in wind

Rain it’s O’ Flaherty, Buskowski

On beer whiskey, talking

Of race tracks and whores.

Kerouac has been high since

1969, Carver repairs the cracks

In the dam, together again un-

Til I think the next line.