The Truth is Concrete

November wind. The feeling of knowing

something before you said it, all over everything.

As in, shadow take me into the side of the mountain.

As in, open up the earth and get inside.

Leaving doesn't mean much. Arriving

means everything, how you came to be where you were,

even if later it will hurt to think of it.

And the forgotten, aren't they always

the most remembered elsewhere, before they perish,

when someone has their eye on them,

and later when the shrines are made

with local flowers and icons of heroes, roses

in midsummer, angels on winter wings?

I'll leave your local customs to your own imagination.

Leaving, though, always a kind

of unfolding of the act of staying. Last night

I knew it was the East wind not asking for me arriving

because the door to the kitchen blew open, last

night, at the edge of sleep, like someone using only half the

alphabet.

The book about Brecht separating at the seam

because my reading had been the last one it could take

before breaking into Exile and After, California

in the middle, with the playwright in short sleeves,

bored on the PCH, looking at the dramatic

cliff work with a friend who meant well, driving,

arriving at the slumlord dockyards saying at last scenery.

You must forgive me or forgive the book for breaking.

It was tired, you see it was a paperback, from the time

people actually wanted ones like that, thought

books like that should be held in hands

on beaches or in cars or in cafes. Sleepy, almost sleepy,

falling asleep, awake, now, I admit it,

I was completely awake, listening to the wind, which I cannot

defend.

Nothing in the mind but that reckless pleasure

and somewhere in the book Brecht saying the truth is concrete

Source: Permission (New Issues Press, 2013)