The Infinite Subtlety of a Tuesday

Bradbury ramblings and poems and ten thousand buttercups

I’ve been immersed in the summer of 1928, Twitter, and the spring of 2023 on Long Mountain.

Woah.

Dandelion Wine. Ray Bradbury, man.

My uncle gave it to me when I was twelve, just like Douglas Spaulding in the book. Unlike Mr. Spaulding, I didn’t get it.

Suede out at Book No Further in Roanoke found me a new copy. The old one vanished somewhere past childhood.

It’s the same printing. Hot diggity. What a book.

With the vestiges of a slight head cold throwing a few more squirrels in the ol’ attic, I went out on an evening stroll. No poems leapt out in finished form, nothing brilliant snapped into place from too much Twitter and a dusty woodshop, but things to be said rustled in the woods just beyond the ridge.

They wafted in off the cool evening pines, murmured up from the creek, and ached in the sight of hazy rafts of fescue blooms. The hay is ripening, and the way the wind tossed the grass in the evening solitude made me suddenly sad for things that never were, and never could have been. It’s a peculiar kind of melancholy.

(If this were a live talk for my friends, someone would say “You’re a peculiar kind of melancholy.” We’d all laugh in agreement. If it were a talk for my senior citizen buddies, someone would get up and leave. Live events keep me honest.)

I trudged through an indifferent emerald path, debating the utility of a particular flavor poetry with myself, a doubly foolish thing to do. One shouldn’t reinvent the wheel over a flat tire, but - one shouldn’t wallow, either.

Here goes.

Ten Thousand Buttercups

Her favorite color was gray

I laughed when she said she was a sociopath

Believe people when they tell you

“Look at the infinite beauty!” I gushed

at a stoplight

in north Richmond

Pavements her favorite color

syringe gray

or empty

“It sounds exhausting to be you” she sighed, annoyed at the multisyllabic effort

Tell me about it.

Where do begin I tell you what’s on my mind?

Count one buttercup

then ten thousand

Scattered like sawdust in the hayfield

I guess they’re

A million chips

Sawn from one board

and one question

One theme

How?

The Infinite Subtlety of a Tuesday

Brave men and

cowards with hearts of venom

A battle

A storm brewing in the west

Finally

Something I’ve waited my whole life for

Something to be put on the planet for

And sometimes all I can do is sneeze like a mouse and wring my hands.

I boiled noodles and scrolled Twitter and looked at sunspots through a special telescope at lunchtime.

And then when evening came I sat beside the creek.

The water grabbed my thoughts, unrolling them like a soggy batch of party streamers

Musty, bleeding poisonous dye and manufactured relevance

“Where there’s a will, there’s a point that people will read and then I’ll matter.” (Maybe?)

I leaned against the tree as the brook laughed and pulled some more

They were fake like canned icing

Is this what it’s like to die?

I’ve traded babbling water for babbling lies, and neither is satisfactory.

Like the time I wrote off God because I was too busy critiquing the preacher.

Now the sun sinks towards the empty mountains marching west

A legion of spiders has woven a blanket of golden threads for his bedtime

Glittering in the field that’s absolutely empty

Night gathers in the empty forest on the lonely slopes

I’m searching for a third way

Among the huckleberries,

My fellow man

and the infinite subtlety

of a Tuesday.