Beginning the Ritual
Another
weirdly warm Winter’s day:
seventy-two
degrees here in December
(and
if December ain’t supposed to be
Winter
then I don’t know what is),
and
the wind is moving all the
fallen
leaves around in big scoopfuls
of
varying shapes, densities, volumes
and
masses, from one front yard
to
another,
up
and down the street, then back again
(wherever
they might happen to drop
and
settle for the moment), if only just briefly,
before
beginning the whole ritual over,
once
more, moving it all about
in
synchronized layered patterns,
like
massive flocks of redwing blackbirds
and
starlings, or better yet:
schools
of tropical fish that somehow
managed
to escape the water
and fly.
A Moment of Clarity
Just a worn-down and twisted spoon
trying to take a break from the
thankless
and exhausting job of measuring out all
the moments of our lives, both
little and large, good or bad.
Just an old, dusty
cobb-webbed whiskey bottle
(its wild, hell-raising days
long behind it now)
sitting in the middle of
a bare dining room table,
a shrivelled spider in its belly,
a glow in the dark skull ring
wrapped around its neck,
a single plastic rose poking up
through its mouth and out
into the wide, weird world.
And then there is this ancient
wooden chair, barely holding together
under the strain of its own weight,
like
high school, somebody says,
like
church, says somebody else,
or maybe a little more
like the kind of chair ‘one would find,
next to the back-alley door
of an all-night diner, in which
many souls have sat for
a much-needed smoke break
over the years.
Hangin’ Out at the Git and Go
The moon tonight
is the lone pink sodium street light
of one more no name, gas station /
grain elevator town with no bar,
no diner, no movie theater
(since 1980-something),
nothing to do on a Friday
or a Saturday night but get
into trouble in some other town
the next county over, or hang out
at the Git and Go, here,
and watch a few cars passing through,
sometimes some outta town types
pull in to gas up and walk around a
while,
stretching and joking,
asking themselves, each other
and, finally, one of us
where the hell are we?
A Place to Crash
I
went to the porch
thinking
I would see rain but
instead
it was the
wind
blowing the last
of
the leaves of the season
out
of the trees (still
stubbornly
clinging
to
their branches) and out in-
to
the wider world
to
find a place to
crash
and lay low ‘til things calmed
down
a little, now
that
Old Man Winter
(that
mean, old bastard) was back
from
his over the
road
gig and just might
be
thinking about hanging
around for a while.
Jason Ryberg is the author of fourteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Are You Sure Kerouac Done It This Way!? (co-authored with John Dorsey, and Victor Clevenger, OAC Books, 2021). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
No comments:
Post a Comment