John R. Goodman

It’s National Poetry Day, I hear.

Long ago, before I reproduced and knew anything, I composed some poems and wrote them down in a little notebook. That notebook followed me around through successive dwellings and domiciles, always nestling at the back of the least-opened drawer. Right now, I can’t find that notebook, with it’s wipe-clean cover in black and gold swirls. But this page is in the least-opened drawer of my frail recollection:

Nuclear fires and spaced-out hells
Blaze matter into something else
Ring the changes
Change the bells
Unverse the universe that swells
Relentlessly to fill a sky
With stars
Between whose fires am I