Poem 307

Not the Tallahatchie bridge where something unidentified was thrown into the muddy water in Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe but the 1980 Hamilton equivalent … I was flatting in Claudelands and this was sparked by an over-excited philosophy student who perhaps felt an umbrella was too bourgeois an item to hold onto … I enjoyed speculating on its subsequent adventures … this feels quite accomplished from my twenty year old self …

( I particularly like the cake shapes, seal’s fin and fruit bat, the rhymes on lapping/flapping, really/feel it’s and the way the poem resolves into three three-syllable lines … )

A Mystery

Where's your umbrella
that you dropped off the Claudelands Bridge?
I saw it scalloping like an emergency chute
cutting cake shapes in the darkness
but I never saw it hit

did it spin down between banks to the sea
or snag and flaps in the current
like a seal's fin or wet wing
in vague distress?

perhaps it was salvaged
and squats unnoticed in a warm room
holding its wet nylon to the fire
glancing eagerly from face to face
     or with more backbone
quit the river of its own accord
and someone is saying
                                                  it followed me home mum
                                                  can we keep it

maybe it's turned nocturnal hunter
in daylight hanging like a fruit bat
by its handle high in the trees
blotting out stars by night
as it roves a ragged sky

where's the umbrella
you dropped from the Claudelands Bridge
it might be lapping milk from a dish
it might be flapping in for the kill
but really 
I feel 
           it's
                 falling still