Sherry O'Keefe at Terrain.org

If you stumbled into my blog I suggest going here to hear Sherry O'Keefe read two wonderful poems. By all means come back, if you're so inclined.

I Still Live in the Same City

September 9, 2010

I dropped my Volvo off for servicing
and instead of waiting
for the mechanics to finish
decided to walk back to my office.
Students rushed to class. The son
of an old friend I seldom see
nodded as he hurried past.
My daughter was in one of the buildings
learning about human development
or discussing “Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God.”
I helped her interpret the sermon last night .
I went to this college decades ago.

On the other side of the campus
I stopped and took Blackberry photos
of the old Newman Machine Company.
It went bankrupt last year
(“business ground to a halt”
is what I'll say
when this becomes a poem)
and now it's being torn down.

My first job was there,
minding a milling machine.
I wrote a poem about what it was like
to punch in everyday
and how I felt trapped
and how one day pigeons
flew in through
a hole in the roof.
I didn't write that I imagined
the pigeons were doves.
The building had green windows
that swung up when the janitor
unhooked them. I once said
out-loud that they looked
like an old-time accountant's eyeshade
and none of the old guys
in their blue work uniforms
talked to me the rest of the day.
I was still learning how to be a man.
Downtown a long train crossed South Elm Street.
The warning honks were too loud.
I put my hands over my ears.
It used to make my mother sad
that her children would never hear a train whistle.

She said it was a sound
that took the lust out of romance,
I guess the way a coke oven
cooks the impurities out of iron.
I could have walked one block over
and looped under the trestle
instead of waiting for the train.

But what was the hurry?
My office was only a block
farther down the street
and I liked being outside.
Now I'm inside my office typing this
when I should be editing
a book about M. Gandhi.
I got a little sweaty on my walk
and the air conditioning,
always too cold
this time of year,
is giving me the shivers.

New Poem and Story

New poem, "My Grandmother Becomes a Young Widow," at Sliver of Stone, a great new journal, and a story, "Smoke," at Conteonline.

Tesla and Love

"Yes, I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. When she was ill I knew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life." Nikola Tesla

It's a familiar story, of how Tesla loved a pigeon who settled outside his window. When I first read that quote while researching a book I laughed and shook my head. But that was a few years ago. Then, for a few years after, it made me sad. Now it makes me smile and admire him a little more. Do you think such a capacity for love was connected in some way to his genius? I can't decide.

(The image is said to be the very pigeon he loved.)

New Flash and Two Poems

I've got a new flash piece up at "The Dead Mule Journal of Southern Literature" and two poems at The Meadowland Review

Bliss is Possible

I've been trying to get on a plane for a short flight to D.C. since 5:30 this morning. Now it's 8:30 p.m. and I'm at my dining room table writing this and checking in occasionally to watch my next scheduled flight be postponed, and postponed again. It's probably dead but doesn't know it yet and I'll have to start over again tomorrow.

)ver the last fourteen hours I've gone through frustration, anger, regret, anxiety, at least two loooong transits through self-pity, more anger--but now I'm floating over the room. I'm lighter than a baby's hand. I can barely reach the keyboard and when I do my fingers blur on impact. I am no longer a corporeal being! My senses are deranged and I'm full of bliss.

Thank you, United Airlines, thank you!

The Picture Above

It's not the ears, too big, like the nose. The hair is boyish and well-trimmed—his father was a barber—but a little too Kennedy, perhaps? Doesn't it have a practiced air? Partly it's the collar, the vest, and the old suit coat. They say "Poverty, but I don't care." And the bottom lip that is, forgive me father for saying so, almost too soft for manliness, while the upper lip is almost not there, as though the bottom one got more than its share.

Most of all I admire the eyes with their sweet snap of "I've got you." He was sixteen in the photo, or so I've been told, and already burdened with lying jester's eyes, too skilled by then at pushing the truth away. And, though I can't escape the truth in his eyes, I cling to the note of innocence you see in the youngster slump, the touch of arrogant twentieth-century America. But what I love most is the crease across the top.