The Poetry Of.
Wayne Noone.................................................................
Wildlife Report Carnegie Pennsylvania
The skunk is gone from these parts
haven't seen one in many years
and calm snakes, now vanished
were very common.
I remember as a boy
sitting with my father
on lawn chairs in the back yard
as a skunk sidled quietly up
alongside.
I was ready to bolt but
my father whispered sit
still he won't hurt ya.
Skunk sat like a housecat
gently licking the chocolate
from a Snickers wrapper
Dad had placed at his feet
great plumed tail
black and white swishing against
his leg.
But the skunk is gone,
replaced by a new variety
of indigenous fauna.
Herds of deer, sometimes as
many as seven or eight
on the hillside behind the house.
Wild turkeys, a large ungainly
male followed by two females.
Red fox capering like a dog
and tossing grubs into
the air
and, most recently
a big goshawk
sitting on the mown lawn
judgmental
with hooked beak and
fierce yellow eyes.
But I miss the skunk
and the snakes of my youth
garters and greensnakes
and the warted toads
I often found among the stones of
cemeteries.
These, somehow
were the simpler beasts
not better
but different
feeding from a more
hopeful landscape.
Forlorn
That place
behind the alley near your house
the lonely place with the cracked screen door,
rusted pieces of air conditioner, broken
downspouts, chips of whitewash on gray
wooden slats, weeds around the
busted concrete steps,
or maybe another place, a place you
haven't seen but know about,
like the roadside near the
Tonidale Exit, overgrown with tufts
of weeds sticking up through the
black gravel, shattered green bottles,
old paint cans, maybe a hubcap.
The way the light hits,
sometimes the hot sun
in the full face of day,
or maybe gray light in the alley at sunset,
it calls your attention, and
you hear the buzzing of bees
and feel like you're going to pass out.
You know these places,
they're where the souls go.
Yawn
I'll tell you if you listen about trackless lives vaporous and unclean
lived out in cubicles in buildings cheaply built and ugly, already shattered,
bombed out and empty while all the while occupied, filled
with the flotsam of two millennia or at least the last twenty years
which after all is the only time that matters and the emptiness all
we have left, here, I'll talk about emptiness,
about the empty sounds of spoons on plastic, of women
desperately and incessantly scraping the bottoms of their yogurt cups
and the blunted tapping of their keyboards forever and aimless,
about the vapid chatter of the day, of concerns over
dogs and children and refrigerators, news of the day
latest child abduction, child abuse, sex scandal, sports team,
I'll tell you of John, my cubemate, fried, so crippled a physician couldn't begin
to heal him, staring for hours at a blank monitor, laughing to himself,
he's a hoot, and there's a million more where he came from,
who as I write this calls Darlene, whom he despises,
to find out if she enjoyed her dinner
at Emil's last night, and other calls, calls by a million Johns
to a million Darlenes all pointless, all already gone.
I'll tell you how, right now, at seven fifty-five a m if you walk down
the carpeted aisle on this floor, in this building, or in every other building
you will see pale faces staring, staring,
their monitors lighting up their faces
with expressions like those of children staring into a fire.
But there is no fire, everything is cool, neutral, and we are no longer fire,
we are cold, have lost our talent for pain, and even
disease and death are gone, neutralized, having lost their glamour.
And this no blessing.
Let me tell you that if you're reading this
you're a goddamn fool because its too late,
too late for you, too late for your children, too late for your sports team,
the time for weeping was twenty
or thirty years ago when Christ was alive and walked this sad earth
when the wood was green and humans could still lick the salt
from each others' faces, when there was still reason to scream
when our screaming could be heard and warriors to listen,
but now there is no apparatus for listening, just dead noise and the scraping
and the calls and the information and all of it so jumbled and confused
that in all seriousness I want to cry out to you help me
let me be free of this somebody tell me this cannot be so
this outrage just cannot be so but it is too late for that
and a leveling has come over all.
