Disorientation
1.
I am riding my bike at night;
it's 65, December
fourteenth. I eat an apple
and stare at naked houses
braced for cold that isn't
there. The breeze comes
richly from the South some-
where down there. James
Wright puts out the trash,
and Wendell Berry walks
the river bank, dressed
in a nylon jacket; Jim
Dickey swills his bourbon
sitting alone on a porch,
saying shit: it is all
on the breeze. Three miles
of night Detroit; I head
for home, surprised, amazed.
2.
I sit on my front porch
smoking a White Owl;
although I do not smoke,
the night demands it. (One
day past, I watched
a mosquito hatched
by our winter heat flit,
crazy, against our window,
astonished, lost.) The night
floats up from Tampa,
from the Gulf, from Cuba, si;
it is December and I think
of the men camped by fires
in the mountains of '58.
The slow death of yesterdays
floats like smoke on the air.
3.
I write in a roomful of books.
A poinsettia is in front
of me, ready to grace
a frigid feast; it is as red
as Carmen. Night earth
is stirring with the crocus
of misbegotten lusts.
A gust of thought of woman
sweeps down from Canada,
torrid and parched. I head
for a drink, a phone, a gun,
for baby Jesus, or a poem.
--John Ditsky
--John Ditsky
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