The thing about spring
Author: John Enright
End of March
Sometimes the trip to Newport is melancholic, no single reason why, if any. Not exceptionally grey today. No rain. Not the anniversary of any death that I remember. The waters of the Bay beneath the bridge were joyless. The close-packed blocks of houses are just old, not charming. No one is smiling. No couples holding hands. End of March, I guess. Only conifers are green—that dead, dark, ominous green.
The driver had a Christian candy-rock radio station out of Boston on. Don’t know if he was listening or not; media tinnitus. I wanted it to be in some other language, one I would never understand. I wanted to be drivng through a different decade, one from a previous century. We cruised through stop signs. My hands are always cold now. These days are like an eternal dusk. I ask the driver about his home in Kenya. His accent sooths me.
The Songs of Water
Don’t confuse time with numbers,
unlike knowing seasons by their fruit.
Numbers fragment, pieces get lost,
we forget time’s wholeness, forget
it’s only energy slowed for us to feel.
*
Time, after all, is our mother, our
lifetime companion, guardian angel
& occasional enemy. Everything past
she has stored there inside you.
There are no numbers anywhere there.
Back
Back when your car was always breaking down, but you could fix it.
Back when getting her bra off was your job and sneakers were cheap.
Before spray paint and street graffiti, when you could always find
a pay phone and a dime and doctors made house calls carrying that
special bag they had filled with all their trade required & MD plates.
Back when the road was a promise, when digital meant only fingers,
when maybe the country or others had enemies, but you didn’t have to.
Yeah, there were shitty top-forty hits and people could be really dumb.
There were still funerals, draftees who never returned, dead junkies,
a winnowing out, mile markers like the white crosses at accident sites.
Got the Interstate now, Internet, GPS and ICE, old time science fiction.
I wouldn’t mind having a smoke with my drink at the bar, wouldn’t mind
being able to hitchhike south out of this century to somewhere warmer
but is there any place still wild? And all that’s back there was never yours.
No Wind is the King’s Wind
Easy there, it’s still your deal, your call
—not everything has meaning.
Primary colors, gulls flying sideways
news a continent away. You choose.
So much else is imposed on you, why
not grab the chance to play favorites?
Yeah, fuck their top ten and the horse
they came in on. Besides, who cares?
Gale warning, nor’easter, yet again.
If today’s news had been different…
another thought swept away…If just
today remains, then all meaning’s there.
Writing’s Genealogy
What’s heard set down in clay /
words begetting new words on a page, no erasures /
more words, more words than sounds, no erasures /
type set in lead, word storms bound in books /
letters on a flatscreen backglow with no volunteers for permanence.
The Yell
Where you are right now
can you yell so loud that
no one else will hear you?
*
Like in a van headed west
somewhere out in Nevada,
a sunset yelp or scream?
*
That time adrift alone off
Fagasa can’t count because
all those terns were listening.
*
And once when I didn’t know
that she was still there to hear
I let my voice escape, go free.
Young au pairs
Incense ashes never vanish.
The smoke, the stick, the scent
might have never existed, but…
*
I mean the wind is unseen but
all the shadows refuse to stop
moving like something alive.
*
Whatever goals I had have
hitchhiked off with a laugh
leaving me here, on a park bench
near a children’s playground
watching the limbs of young au pairs.
Coney Island Selfies
Remember when selfies
were the two of you scrunched
together striking poses
on that narrow seat behind
the curtain of a boardwalk
photo booth, that strip of
wallet-sized black and white
shots that would last
forever like a memory?
Rainforest
Rainforest
Samoa, 30 years ago
I had been working with two villages in Savai’i on a rainforest preservation project funded by the Swedish Society for the Conservation of Nature when the cyclone hit. I was back on Tutuila. Our island, a hundred miles east, was spared. What little news we could get from Savai’i was dire. Our Environmental NGO, Le Vaomatua, quickly organized, collecting relief goods—food and clothing. We set up donation stations outside grocery stores and collection bins for clothes. Within four days, in time to catch the next ferry west, we had enough to fill a borrowed flatbed lorry, piled high and covered with donated tarps.
I did not take the ferry ride. I flew over to Upolu and met the boat in Apia. I hooked up there with a woman chief from Savai’i, whose name but not she has slipped from my memory. We had to get the truck and its load cleared through customs before the boat headed on to Salelologa on Savai’i. It would be leaving soon.
The cyclone had damaged Upolu as well, and the government officials wanted our shipment to stop there. They insisted that, as relief goods, it all had to be turned over to the local Apia Red Cross. Otherwise, if we took it to another island, they would charge import duties on it all—many hundreds of tala, which I did not have. While she—God, what was her name? She was a force—went off to fight the officials in their offices, I went to the boat where our truck was still parked to check on it. The customs officers there knew what was going down. We talked. They had their orders, but they did not like them. Some were from Savai’i. One of them—the one with the most stripes on his tunic’s sleeve—filled in a form setting the worth of our truckload at just two hundred tala, at 15% duty. I paid the 30 tala, got the official clearance stamp on the document, and stayed with the truck on the trip to Salelologa. Only the guys at the top were pissed. We got everything divided and delivered to the villages. I stayed a while. That piece of climax rainforest is still preserved.
John Enright: Reality Salad 