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Monday, November 07, 2011

My hollow has a metal sound (the poem)

[Well, I'm posting one more poem before I take my pause from regular blogging to focus on a longer-term project (and I may break the silence again if the muse takes me unexpectedly, as she often does).]

My hollow has a metal sound.

My hollow is sounding this way:
A hinged flap clangs,

tapping against its empty cylinder.
There are cinders in the tender

trap I laid yesterday

to catch a glimpse of a gleam.
The gleam leaped from a small crinkle

in the steel, and got free
before I could show it how much

I loved it.

Then, I closed my eyes.
When I close my eyes, I can see

flares of color.
Monday, it isn’t blue, it’s red,

a ruby splatter creeping

its stain of warmth to the very edge.
Tuesday, it’s blue. Tuesday is

a sapphire pool slowly spreading its wet
to cool off Monday’s hot.

Today is Wednesday. That gleam was

supposed to be my yellow.
Without it, what I see slips back into a black

velvet landscape they’ve re-placed inside
a cheap aluminum frame.

What I see in it is

what I saw on it, when the black was more
sheet-metal gray, and it was and is

a wounded robot hand-painted white
to wander

across the wastes where my human mind

once played with colors.
It’s collecting glints off smooth-faced

granite with its sensitive sensors for eyes.
They’ll help fill its hollow,

a hollow suddenly sounding less metal.

3 comments:

Eileen T O'Neill ..... said...

Francis,

I have been absent myself simply with all that goes with daily living!
My muse was also 'on vacation' and that was a lonely experience.
I have always enjoyed your poems and I do hope you will find both the time and motivation to return when you can.
I enjoyed reading this poem, since it has such feeling. There is a feeling of an emptiness within, but even while trying to find that, we can stumble across something we had never been aware of. There all along, but like our muse, absent at the wrong time!!!
I wish you well Francis and safe journey as you voyage back here again.Soon I hope!!!
Eileen :)

Francis Scudellari said...

Thanks Eileen. I hope you're novel is going well. I'll be back here relatively soon, I think, I just want to break out of the need I felt to post every day, or every other day. My work was suffering from trying to meet artificial deadlines.

opel d hell said...

Francis, this is so nice! glad to have caught the reverberation - this palette of echos - sonar of insight :)