Alan: David Kresh once wrote a poem that quoted, as an epigraph, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s wonderful “Bright moments, bright moments, bright moments, right now." Here’s a “bright moments” poem from the road.
Driving Route 127
Occasionally there are moments
traveling a perfectly ordinary stretch of road
topping a perfectly ordinary low rise
to glimpse between the upraised arms of trees
a perfectly ordinary small hill
floating above an implied but unspecified
minor valley
the heart spasms itself so happily tight
you could die now, and should,
making of this a final vision
and grace.
Why then must we keep going over
and down the once again
imperfectly dull miles
knowing our real death waits
patient and banal
to flag us as we round some future
unremarkable blind curve?
Is it we so desire
just another such moment and another,
or suppose that to pause in one
will trip this coherence instantly to decay,
or fear that our minds will hurry forward regardless
leaving our bodies stupidly for all to see
forever dumbstruck and agawk?
Nancy: If you suppose that the following hints at some argument with certain small magazines that mistake the merely fashionable for the truly creative, you’d be right.
Always Seeking The Growing Tip
Hidden behind a cushion
of epidermal tissue, behind tough
expendable cuticle, the active
meristematic cells do their thing.
Which is: to penetrate, to pierce,
to pry, to make a way through grit,
to thrust through rubble, to crack stone;
to suck, to sip, to eke.
All this in the dark, even
rejecting light, tropic,
these cells, this growing tip,
to gravity and elemental stuff.
Elsewhere, coteries form and dissolve
around umbels, around corymbs; much
is made of this panicle or that,
even of ephemera, that have one
– only one – day in the sun.
In the dark, the growing tip is always pushing,
always ready to differentiate; if you are seeking
the growing tip, never look where it was yesterday.
It will have gone, on;
always look in new ground.
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