Invisible

Not everything has to be visible
To be seen
You know this from
Honeycombs inside the hive
Where drones buzz around in circles
Shining in amber amber
armor
You hear only their song
But know there’s something more

The ticking of a clock
isn’t just making noise
It represents some unknown
quantity made manifest
Made into a form we can use
Bite-sized history
Spread out in human terms

For human hands form coliseums
with this tool
Arcades and mausoleums, too
We depend on it
For human hands work with time
and waste it

I admit, I waste as much as I spend
Being sure, getting comfortable
Inside my own skin
Getting set on the starting blocks
for this race
I'll never win

Race against time
And you lose.

All Marvels Cease

Everything the world makes to impress
ceases
In the quiet and the dark

When the curtain’s torn down
clever words cease, broad dreams cease
Nothing’s amazing, nothing’s exceptional,
nothing’s bright or beautiful.

Once you place them in the hand and peer at them,
They’re all just noise.

The placid audience waits for its encore
but gets none
The curtain ripped from its rusty moorings
There’s only music to walk out the doors to

I wrestle with this noise in the absence of light,
where all marvels cease to impress the world.

You who can
carry me through the darkness,
leave me
soundless on the doorstep.

I saw the sign again today
Outside the Conoco Tri-Mart

With your name
& Welcome Home
You came back
out of nowhere
To wreck the silhouettes
That I’ve constructed

Your jeep tires spun
endlessly
I see them in the cold
Bed-sheets
Wide awake but dreaming
you gave up
But they still gave you that ribbon,
Mom crows with pride
But what will you do
When the egrets don’t recognize
this man you’ve become?

My brass tines
Rake the surface in unison
Like this year’s goslings following
Along after their mother
Trailing triangles of swirling sunfish

But I know better
Than to look underwater
Where algae gather with pride
Like emerald scum
I am a sunfish, too
Thrown back after every catch

Where will you go,
your sword of lilacs
Splintering every rising sun
with a wink?

Now, stand tall by the gazebo in
Pekarna Park,
across from the ancestral log home.
Hold me close
Then tell me
what it is anymore
that we fight for

Oh soldier mine
Take this gun from me
Unload and
Make it safe

Only one thing I promise
is true:
That you can’t pass time
like the others do,
breathing through shadow gills,
Once you hear those brass tines
Strumming.




Photo by Orin C. Metts

Though Rebecca was born in Boston, Massachusetts, spent most of her life in southwestern Ohio, and tried her luck for ten years in Las Vegas, NV, it was her move this June to southern Twin Cities’ Jordan, MN, that lead her to the glamorous life.

“In my new hometown, you trust what your neighbors tell you. And they you. It’s the first Internet, but one with a pair of human hands and eyes and a friendly face. You can see it clear enough when they speak to you, when you learn that people here have no reason not to tell you the truth. The small town tradition of storytelling, too, was a revelation for a life-long suburbanite like me, especially coming in from a closed-mouthed environment like Las Vegas. There, you also learn to close your eyes, and to adopt a distrust of other people. Then your own self. But it’s not the way they do things here. In Scott County, Minnesota, talk isn’t cheap. It’s truly all we have.”

She shares an apartment with her boyfriend Orin C. Metts (who took the photograph), less than one block from Pekarna Park and a five-minute walk from the algae of Mill Pond.

Rebecca’s prose musings on music and songwriters (and the Triangle cities of North Carolina) live at this address: http://onelakestreet.blogspot.com. Starting in mid-November, her Minnesota photo essays can be seen here: http://roundmillpond.blogspot.com. Attn: Bill Holm, no box-elder bugs were harmed in the creation of these poems.

Last update : 13-10-2007 10:20

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