"or was it backward,
I had to ask
as I turned
to reach for a faraway towel."
~billy collins, "the long day"
it seems trite to tell you
that i write,
while sitting in the rain on a black metal chair
with a hole in my left shoe and
a cigarette in my right hand,
about the galaxy in her eyes
or the homeric epics in his head,
or to bring your attention to
-- is it a fact? --
that "homeric epics" are an understudy
to the pain he felt when he,
but a solitary astronaut,
realized he floated in plantary rotation
around but one of her planets,
the pain itself, having broken its leg,
being unable to stand for itself,
and wondering,
is it coy or crass or perhaps
is it a moment of poetic fury,
to ask the illiad to take its place on paper?
would it be heavyhanded,
to point,
line by line,
to how the poem,
more thinly constructed than tinkertoy windmills,
rose from dust into its eden home?
but most of all,
to end the poem,
not with some profound utterance or
subtle nod to the more favorite of plato's forms,
but rather,
languidly, as if intentionally,
an incomplete sentence,
an unfinished phrase.
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