Tag Archives: poem fragments

3. There’s a Trick to Painting Water

(I filled 15 more pages with words today, but none of them rang true; so I’m posting this instead)

Why is it easier to find
space between the notes
inside the storm’s tumult
than in a quiet room?

They say she found God
on a bus to Baltimore
amidst the screaming
children, drunks, & hairpin
turns, crammed into
a brown and orange seat,
knees locked, lips dry,
stale air and candy wrappers
proclaiming a landscape
long since abandoned to fate.

True revelations, they say,
never come when called;
like grass and dandelions
they only grow
where they’re not wanted.

How then, to map the bubbles
in the frothed milk,
the correlation between
the ripples in the pressed tin ceiling?

Where, then, the magic
elixir, the skeleton key
to unlock the hidden passages,
the junk DNA, the way
light falls through a prism crack
in an old dusty window?

(partial transcription from Patchwork Journal – T.H.)

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Filed under National Poetry Month 2014