Reflections on Passages | Pasajes
by Nick Graham
The flight of geese, following the apex of the crowd.
Hearing the same sentence from Yeats or whomever over and over is like an Andy Warhol iteration printed over and over in time.
I have nothing to say and i am saying it. And that is poetry as I need it.
Dragonflies thread about the air above the earnest practitioners in colored tees.
These phrases thread through them like the dragonflies. John Cage. The Mamas and the Papas. Lennon
At some point they move away. We can no longer hear them above the traffic and the chatter of children. Even our own rustling is louder. We wonder if we are supposed to hear, or like a gender it is rude to ask about we should accept the privacy of it and eventually fall into unrelated conversation. The fragrance of insect repellents warm in the setting sun. Four little girls move closer in stripes and unicorn headbands to investigate. Three boys peal with excitement as they throw a foam airplane around.
They’re holding little boxes as if there were crickets inside, like in a Bertolucci film.
Sometimes they concentrate into the center with a chord crescendo. This we hear well, those cardinal tones inescapable as the rungs of a ladder, even outside on the supple grass with the lemon and eucalyptus oils and the children and the John Cage.
The husband and the wife and the neighbor, passing from each to each the glowing, breathing ember in the banana leaf, some artifact of nostalgia to not be the last of itself on earth.