Featured Poet: M.C. Rydel
Walking Without a Destination
a sestina for Sense-A
It’s easy to walk a lot of miles
When you don’t have anyplace to go.
The walks close to home have sounds
As familiar as high school bands
Practicing, or a car radio, so loud
Crossing guards alert the troopers ahead.
Out of town walks have sounds
Unfamiliar (some soft – some loud).
Strange traffic patterns ahead,
Dim streetlights going on for miles
And an anonymity which bands
The tourists together everywhere they go.
Alone, a walker could go five miles
In the city and not hear one loud
Scream or gunshot anyplace ahead;
The same walker in Iowa sounds
Fearless as he watches bikers go
Smoke in the parking lot with country bands.
With a partner, I can walk ten miles,
The words on her lips the only sounds
That matter in the next moments ahead;
We walk until hopelessly lost and go
Ask for directions from roving bands
Of teenagers, who make sure they’re always loud.
It’s easy to walk a lot of miles
When you don’t have anyplace to go.
Nighttime forces you to study the bands
Of stars, until finding Polaris, ahead
Of the clouds carrying storms, loud
As cannons to the citizens afraid of sounds.
Daylight brings its own problems, ahead
Of any other considerations; rock bands
Break up because the singer wants to go
Alone; the rest of us wander for miles,
Sing a bit off key and a little too loud,
And fall in love with the way her name sounds.
I haven’t a place where I really want to go,
And there is no place I would never go.
Walking without a destination is easier than it sounds.
Months of Immortality
Everyone in my family
Dies during the month of October.
You’ve got to know that about us
Before you get involved.
My grandfather died a lieutenant
In the Battle of Argonne Forest
About a month before the Armistice.
He left two little children behind.
My dad, the younger one,
Lived almost to the year 2000.
He walked in red and yellow woods
Every October day till the very end.
We found him on a park bench
The wind flapping his trench coat lapels.
Everyone in my family
Dies during the month of October.
My sister’s the bravest of us all.
She skydives every autumn weekend,
Finds midweek deals in Colorado
To ski the expert runs;
Been known to jump out of taxicabs
Right in the worst part of the city
And gets drunk in costume on Halloween night,
Screaming shit about immortality, like a god.
Everyone in my family
Dies during the month of October.
You’ve got to know that about us
Before you get involved.
Indestructible. I am indestructible.
The next eleven months are mine.
I can manipulate the very time zones
With an app on my phone.
My nieces and nephews, daughters and sons,
Look both ways before jaywalking,
My dogs don’t run through open gates.
My cats safely cross the busiest streets.
Yet the people who haven’t met me yet
Don’t know a thing about my fate,
I am the master of my existence,
The shaper of unshaped destiny.
I am immortal until the light of the next October sun.
Makes me dance until the long, long month is done.
Seducing a Widow
For Zach
Move at least a thousand miles away,
Especially when you are young and still stumbling
Into discoveries of unestablished significance:
Brazilian orchids that may cure asthma;
Light year long radio waves, incomprehensible;
Sauces of garlic, ginger, mango, and butter.
Then, you just have to let it go,
Like a water skier dropping the ropes
Or a litterer with cellophane, or like a widower yourself,
Just letting everything go, as he unwinds,
Unties, unfastens, and loosens his first widow
Who has been convinced, to let everything go.
Make yourself a thousand years old.
Live twenty lives. Remember them all.
Tell stories. Listen to the wind. Take naps.
Soon, you will be all alone, a cynic in the subway,
Homeless, living in a barrel, writing messages
All over dollar bills, defacing people’s change
With obscenities, ideas, and ransom notes.
That is what will get her attention.
Make her see you for as young as you are.
Muscles in gym shorts, a day-old beard,
Hairy arms tuning an acoustic guitar
As you wait for her to come to you in her bed.
Move another thousand miles away.
Disappear like a sports car passing on the right,
Linger like a piano pedal’s last long note,
Find a beach, a sunset, a skyline,
Forget everybody, look for something new,
Spend time with tender piercings and tattoos.
She will decide to move a thousand miles too,
Maybe more, looking for untrodden villages,
The French coast, lights gleaming and then gone,
Until she shows up years later as a post card,
A single line of text in code, read aloud,
Nothing but syllables and ink, languished, forlorn, and ready.
Windswept at the Demonstration
Zuccotti Park, 2011
She’s sweet disorder wrapped in a blanket.
Crimson hair thrown on the shoulders,
Her dark eyes absorb the last light before sunset
As drums and voices and sirens and wind
Answer the cobblestone clomps of horses
Beneath the mounted police around our encampment.
They’ve let us keep the tents for one more night,
Let the library, soup line, medical staff remain
As November makes us seek cover
And cocoon in sleeping bags in the darkness.
She’s willing to let me enter her dreams, she says,
Into the pathless woods of ghosts and crystals,
Premonitions and tarot cards, stars and beach fires,
Travelers and gypsies, a pot of steaming soup, a waning moon,
And the buried streets of gaslights and hitching posts
That lie dozens of feet beneath this public park,
Once a maze of nineteenth century avenues
That the city we occupy has built over.
She leads me out of this deep winter sleep
As the wind rattles our canvas walls
And the music finally subsides and the scents
Of makeshift dinners dissipate into the dew
Of tomorrow morning, when we march again
And mingle with the rest of the universe as inconvenience.