Gardenias
This night, like any other lonesome,
wide-open night down here on this
mean, old mortally coiled-up world of ours.
These rather cruel and unresponsive stars
staring right through us all the time
with the cold, indifferent light of their
million-
upon-million light year stares.
The empty, unfathomably chasmic spaces
in between them, between them and me,
and each one of them actually a sun
with some kind of planetary system
of its own, they say.
And for some reason (don’t ask me why),
it all leaves me thinking of that scene
in Apocalypse Now where Brando is
talking
to Sheen about some abandoned and overgrown
gardenia plantation on the banks of the
Ohio River—
like five miles of heaven just opened up on the Earth
in the form of gardenias.
Weird, huh.
Jason
Ryberg is the author of twelve books of poetry,
six
screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders,
notebooks
and scraps of paper that could one day be
(loosely)
construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry
letters
to various magazine and newspaper editors.
He
is currently an artist-in-residence at both
The
Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s
and
the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor
and
designer at Spartan Books. His latest collections of poems
are
Zeus-X-Mechanica (Spartan Press, 2017)
and
A Secret History of the Nighttime World (39 West Press, 2017).
He
lives part-time in Kansas City with a rooster named Little Red
and
a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere
in
the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also
many
strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Tags:
Poetry