POETRY
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| The Blue Ridge Rolling along the Blue Ridge on a foggy Virginia morning. My brother lives down there where Jefferson rode his fields. I cannot go see him now- I am wandering somehow sent north along this ridge by some mission to remember. The fog like soldier's ghosts comes up to greet me as miles roll off beneath my wheels. The whole valley steeps in sadness Red Star Express, Golden Rule Homes For Sale signs everywhere along all the roads not taken. My father's hand reaches out a hand under a child's belly swimming for the first time (outside the womb that is) then the hand is gone forever. Float or sink: there is always this decision. |
| Central Avenue Bleak street sodium street lamps car lights loom in fog like owls' eyes. Daily I say: "pray for earth". She needs more help than you or I can say. Surely this earth is not about us! All we need do is look into a meadow in spring- see the tumult: life boiling in wildflowers, grasses and a billion bacteria in one gram of soil. How small our human toil grinds away the softer edges of the world. Grind! or be ground into pulp by machines we have created from greed and the hunger to fill the empty sockets we once called souls. |
| American Ode Riding time through eastern Kentucky where every grey board barn every broken down backyard brick block garage mechanic shop every tarpaper thrown up shack every shrub scrub weedy ravine creates itself everyday. I stop at Pastor Rev. and Mrs. Terry Lewis' Lucky Stop Pentecostal Church in Barksburg, Kentucky. A hot wind blows up From the Gulf of Mexico with the voice of Walt Whitman 150 years ago and I rejoice... in this same America and as if a lifetime of cynicism unshouldered me onto this back road, barnyard, rolling green patureland: Kentucky in January. A chill runs through this- a Kerouac joy- and why he would drink himself to death unable to sustain the rambunctuous American self creating with enthusiasm we do not even know we have. Twisting and turning down through the tortuous hills of the Daniel Boone National Forest east of Lexington. Every few miles a hamlet appears each with two revival churches, a general store, a mechanics' shop: man embedded- in the sublime indifference of nature as he turns to God in apposition. Every brown board backyard barn, every broken down brick block garage mechanic shop, every tarpaper thrown up shack, every daily turning remembers: this indifference. Surely, we are not this nature it goes without us- we mere visitors- a moment of thought- a dreams' time- making man-made things and well aware of cataclysms to come. C1999 Roy H. Sagarin |
| Neon Night America is neon night electric skyline bright signs fit everywhere along the wayside show and tell it is- heaven? or is it hell? We are on wheels ever turn'n round a merry go sound hurdy gurdy street music machinery and you and me and... Jugglers and clowns and elephants and acrobats all envelopes, Hershey's bars poker games 'n green felt pool tables' long green smoke. And one day she said: "It's springtime... and I want to be in love..." Would it have matterred if it had been in the fall? Oh... crystal snowflake sparkle on oily street at six below zero 6 am january 6 1963- this hitchhiker memory is what love is now. I want to be in love with tomorrow and drunk with words today. I think of Kerouac since I live in the city where he died and know he was just that: drunk and word drunk- with the whelming gush of words fountaining with a rushhhhhhhhhhhhhh of movement which is America now... hey that's IT: movement- THE place where everything and everyone changes everyday where everyone changes every thing everyday.... Scary HEY!.... like supermen and women every where which way but every day like merrily we roll along, roll along..... like: what after all is TIME? c2,000 by Roy H. Sagarin |
| DESIRE Here is a blonde girl on a towel on white sand with a black suit on and tattoes on her lower back- black purse with looped straps sits still alongside in the sand. A strange seagull stares at her- blue water white sand red bench her red toenails stick up like petals how simple it all could be if I untie her bra strap and slide fingers under the black bathing suit and fish around in the dark. Here we are together on a beach with the gulf out there and also everywhere. Sea salt and sounds of birds and a grandmother with children. How, after all did we get here today? I flick a little spider off my leg take a sip of water click the pen a few times. All nature waits... She and I see the sun only from slightly different angles. The moon at 3:30 am last night was shaped like an egg overhead. Time slips through my fingers today. A man in a red bathing suit walks by not making any sound whatsoever. On the towel she goes on reading a magazine as if nothing of our love ever happened. A jet aircraft passes overhead in a rush and slowly the sound of birds rises out of the slowly diminishing din as if out of the earth. The curve of her breast reaches into the black cup of her bra... Two figures stand backlit in the water they talk with their arms... I rub tired eyes. A young man slips into sandals, puts on a tee shirt and strolls off the beach. A boat whirrs by in the distance... It is said if you lose one sense the others develop in compensation. If we go blind to one another Do we hear the silence deepen? Does the smell of our death enrich some new sense of life? Roy Sagarin C2,000 |