i

Freshness

Mike Berger sent this one:

CLUELESS POET 

The editor says he wants
distinct images so I am
sending him photographs.
He says he hates cute
bunny poems so I'm striking
the B-word from my list.
He doesn't want trite rhymes
like love and above. Cowboy
verse is worse than twangy
cowboy songs. To print the
inane would be insane. Please
no blood and guts. The editor
wants fresh language so
I'm spraying this poem
with FebreZe.

I write Mike back and I tell him that the poem is "close," meaning I'm about to reject it but it's a close call.  Then I tell him I'd like to put it in the Note.  I realize that I think the poem is too "inside" for the regular pages of RHP.  At which point it occurs to me that, probably, 95% of the people who read RHP are poets and a similar percentage of people who still read poetry anywhere are either poets or unhappy high school or college students who'd just as soon not.  So, if it's mostly poets who read RHP, what in the world mades me think the poem is too "inside"?

Plus, I should have given Mike credit for working Febreze into a poem. For those of you unaware, this is a spray that disguises the smell on fabrics of cigarette smoke, among other odors, by making them smell like Febreze instead.  Everybody wants "fresh" poems, but more people should be interested in poems about freshness.  This is the closest I ever came to a freshness poem:

IONIC BREEZE

Near the west window it stands.
Tower of electronic silence.
Its shadow falls slant
across the sleeping cat.
It cleans the air.
Gone the allergens:
The dander of my familiar;
The haze from Lucky Strikes;
Giving me a sharper image
of the objects in my room.
It bathes my face in ions.

 

ii

the awesomeness of consciousness

 

Our daughter Claire is fine, following a motor vehicle accident on the campus of the University of Alabama. 

 

Great relief.  No one hurt. Airbags deployed. Not her fault, either.  Not on her cell phone.  A guy in a pickup truck decided to make a left turn in front of her, without the right-o-way.  When she saw he was about to hit her, she took a hard left and they collided, thus the front-end damage. 

The airbag deployed and she sat there for a second in the immediate shock of the accident.  She told us that she said to herself

"I'm conscious.  Awesome."

I'm going to start saying that to myself from time to time.  "I'm conscious.  Awesome!"

Here's a weird thing.  She got out of the car, in a sort of daze of course, and she noticed that a baseball is in the middle of the street near the accident.  Just noticed how oddly out of place it was.

After she got the car to the body shop, she went by and took pictures, including the one above...and the one below.  Look at the damage to the windshield.

 

 

Are you guys thinking what I'm thinking?  Hey.  THAT'S BASEBALL DAMAGE.

But how did it happen?  Where'd the ball come from? It's a mystery.

Frogs falling out of the sky. The great monolithic stone men on Easter Island. The mammoth etchings of birds in the foothills of the Peruvian Andes. The whereabouts of Amelia Earhart. The grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza. The wave and the particle, at once, and never, and neither. The curvature of space.  A baseball on a street in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, surrounded by glittering glass gravel, and the smell of steam.

Anyway. 

Here comes Issue 26 into your life.  It's an entirely new issue.  None of us  has immunity to it. 

Claire.  Conscious.  Awesome.

 

Dale