Rupert Loydell and Robert Garlitz
What Blues
Scribble, scrawl and try to save yourself.
Your thin red line rides violent waves,
a chopstick saviour for our seasick lives.
Light pours down to bless each day
we jig the colors to dance off
what blues we might gather around us.
Woke up this morning and wished I
hadn’t: the day loomed full of rain.
I am allergic to cheerfulness and wish
partygivers and partygoerers would take their balloons
off to some deserted fjord in another
galaxy. Bad brakes on the car means
we never know when or where to
stop; damaged windshield means we’re driving blind.
Email news tonight of your death this
evening on the west coast. My birthday.
You were radiant in March. Radiant now.
At Home
Thunder clouds circle the spires and domes
of history. The diagrammatic plan is useless,
cannot conjure the dark city and canals.
Thousands of years of correct interpretations obscure
the icons and holy texts. Encircling key
passages makes us more helpless. Only black
can close the circle for all time
as storm clouds gather, drip greys and
blues. Cool air blows off the lake.
Ducks scrounge along the shore, begging crumbs,
white loneliness approaches, fills the whole afternoon.
I perspire and feel at home in
history. Lifelong friendships are formed from emotional
incident, stray emails or a friendly review.
We’ll dine tonight in Chelsea, or the
Owl’s Nest. The noisy lesbians will stack
seven beer bottles. Jazz trio cools everyone.
Robert Garlitz is Professor of English at Plymouth State University in central New Hampshire. His poems and essays have appeared in Three Candles, Ranam, Mudlark, Sierra Nevada Review, The Lucid Stone, Tangents, Stride, Slope, Centripetal and Exquisite Corpse. In 2001 Stride Press published Robert Lax: Speaking To Silence with Nicholas Zurbrugg, & Rupert Loydell. The prose poem collection, Snowshoes Across the Clouds, with Rupert Loydell, appeared last year. His study of language and religious rhetoric, Kenneth Burke’s Logology and Literary Criticism , will appear later this fall. blog: http://garlitz.typepad.com
Rupert Loydell is the Managing Editor of Stride Publications, Editor of Stride magazine, an Associate Editor of Avocado magazine and a regular contributor of articles and reviews to Tangents magazine. Since 2003 he has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, working at Universities of Bath, Wawrick and in Exeter schools. In 2004-2005 he was Visiting Writer at Sherborne School. He lives in Exeter, Devon with his wife and two daughters. Recent publications include A Conference of Voices, The Museum of Light and Endlessly Divisible, and four collaborative works. The Smallest Deaths is forthcoming from bluechrome.