Poem 162

Another from the September to December poem-a-day push of 1982 – this would have been first order of business at 9am, then I would have worked on the short story I was writing that week (ending the three months with twelve stories and sixty poems) … it looks like I got my subject here from the morning news and it prompted me into musing on the ever-creeping line between directly experienced and reported history …

( I very much like the fossil is not the flower nor the shell the shellfish … )

Fossil Flower

Brezhnev is dead
and this morning the last
of the Politburo to know Lenin
the last nameless old Russian
who was really there

human history is not swamped
but forgotten
each generation a leaky balloon
squeezing its attrition of souls
into the sky
it dies a natural death
and whatever comes after
is no true likeness

thousands of words cannot explain
pictures and photos pencilled with made-up names
and pinned on the crucial hour
the fossil is not the flower
nor the shell the shellfish
no matter what you find
still it will be less than the truth
the loose tooth of time
rattles only in the heads
of those few left
old ugly bereft of any good or guilt
attaching to then
it will be pulled soon enough

the rough army of oblivion
now pitches in nineteen seventeen
where our grandparents hold the line
a year of no man's land between
see the ranks steadily thin
quickly dwindle and fall
the revolution is dead
the coast clear for history

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