The pond is radioactive.
At least it sounds like it. The cricket frogs are singing their crackly Geiger counter Hey ladies, and the toads are doing their toadiest to trill over it.
All is quiet in my empty office as a new chapter begins.
In the corner, passport stamps come to life, or at least 3D, remnants of where I’ve been, and who I’ve been.
The cigar box guitar I took to NYC. A book on the shelf by my old high school principal. (This month would be my twenty year reunion.) A framed jigsaw puzzle by “Irene” (from Cities on a Hill), showing five majestic horses fording a stream. “For your new life in the country” she had said softly, ducking and blinking back tears, a parting gift when I left the north. It’ll be in a place of honor.
I type this at a desk I fashioned from my old kitchen table, rough sawn walnut from dad’s old neighbor, resting on oak fenceboards from this front yard, held aloft by yellow poplar legs, cut from scrap from one of my old neighbors.
The frogs are relentless, and I love it.
I’m (sort of) moved in to my new house.
Wonder what I’ll build here. I intend to make it good, built on doing the work that needs doing.
The tornado of work and shoveling rocks and homeowner’s insurance quotes and verifying things and spinning four DJ shows in Roanoke today and coffee too late in the evening and the upheaval of moving has blurred and swirled together in the ol’ noggin, so here’s a poem. The title showed up in the early afternoon on the freeway past the Mill Mountain Star. As far as the rest goes–I’ll be as surprised as you to read it.
Subtle as a Train Wreck
They say I’m subtle as a train wreck
And I say thank you
because there is something subtle about trains
The way they keep sneaking by me with a sly wink of their cyclops eye
one eighth human, seven rusty metal dragon
“Hey Josh, did you hear about the …”
By the time I turn to hear, as if to catch a half-uttered phrase from an old friend
They’re gone to points west
With a lurch and a squeal of steel on steel
Off to rattle some forgotten glade in the blue distance
And I miss their point
But keep feeling that I should follow–follow something, if only the echo of a memory unlived
It’s in the same family of beckoning
Orchestrally speaking (You know, violins and cellos)
As when the lazy mountains on a boiling September afternoon
Preach without words
An ache somewhere I didn’t know existed
Tells me to listen
Poetry…what good is poetry when there are trenches to dig?
Maybe it’s in the same family as the mountains and the argument of steel wheels, orchestrally speaking
Sometimes I hope I’ll never hear the unfinished phrase of the westbound freight
But I always feel
That I should pay attention.
-Josh