Pome
We of the Research Institute for Inane Triviality are often in receipt of generously versified paperwork. Sometimes the senders offer up to us some sort of vague exclamations! Mostly, though, we provide a holographic reciptical for any and all written refuse; the bumping and fledgling newborn chick waddling in the world featherless, the aged and decaying though still breathing cat, and even provide a home for those creatures that transcend age and all its straining linear boundaries. Not to say that we take in stray animals, this is simply reverse-personification; we do assure you, we only let in paper - stray paper. And, well, lah dee dah, we do take it all.
An odd and unclassifiable document has arrived and, miraculously, it contains with it a self initiated critique of the very submission being submitted! In short, the writer has done our job for us simply by explaining what he or she intended when she or he or me or we decided to plot down on paper this small thing called a "pome", and, as if that alone were not enough, the writer has kindly informed us of the date at which this and that were both written. We, of course, have an annoying propensity to discard the present and cherish the wrapping - ignoring the orange's meat but happy to munch on the peel - and, as such we have decided to try things the other way around. Instead of providing the critique sans-poem, we provide for you the poem/pome sans-self-critique. We find that poets are over eager to discuss their own poems/pomes, and since we are in a place of power here we can mangle what we will and disregard what we wish. You might be misguided, reader, and that is just fine: We have one staffer with a penchant for line-breaks, and, well, we can't be too sure that this poor person hasn't accidentally broken the lines of the critique thus poemizing it! Inane is right.
What follows is something we are not too sure of. We think it is about symbolism, we imagine it might be about the way a human attempts to fill a glass with water as well as wishes, we might even be under the impression that this has something to do with religion, but most of all we like the smallness, the triviality of it. A man and a woman go on a hike, she concerned with committing the day to memory and he concerned with her concern (yes, a very trivial scene) though, something is revealed somewhere by way of a single silken leaf.
She asks for a leaf,
some keepsake of nature
to store the day's memory in
not just any but a pretty one
dried with some life left.
She will hang it from her wall
tracing its outline with her eye
while recalling a stray laugh, or kiss
or some other vague event
trapped in the little veins of the object.
An ugly one won't do -
it must be as attractive and as chosen
as the day it will come to represent
and any blemish would intrude
upon the reminciscence.
They plod along the trail.
His eyes dart from symbol to symbol
in search of the right one
this leaf too withered, that too fresh
and the task becomes behemoth.
He stoops to grab
what he believes to be a perfect specimen,
a leaf which matches the day's glory and splendor.
He presents it to her,
she frowns: it is fake.
somewhere in Kansas, like two kites flying - 1985
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Kansas? We wonder what leaf or leafs they may have seen. Poulus deltoides, that yellow bursting god of the earth? That would have been quite symbolic! No, maybe it was a deciduous Oak of some variety, as they are the most common in the forests of that odd state. If we were the writer, it would certainly be an old split-tree, judging from their aparent disparateness. Her need for symbolism, followed by his eventual finding of an ideal symbol only to realize that it is not of nature at all - well, all we can do is weep, all he can do is present her with some sham, and all she can do is treat the present like the projected past.
For this submission, we heartily applaud and lap up the spilled milk of this pome.
