continued:

CRONICAS

Since literature is more than news, the words fill both receptacles, though which comes first
remains in abeyance, the sirens keep alternating a blare with a bloop one long, one short,
as though faits divers arrive any time of day or night whereas cronicas take waking hours
to do, though I thought my hand was in when the prose poem came of age in America, lace
panties of poetry waiting to be pulled delicately down and the wooing begin with ecstatic
intent, so I said to myself, leaving the house one day I decided not to come back, or did I?

Melville on his ships, Hawthorne in his shadows, I grow too old for Emerson’s dispatches
to the future, Thoreau’s vast country he would save, future or past, it’s all in the story
shaped and sent where you are, you beauty, wanting to touch skin that falters here,
what else can the old do or desire, we are sad facts for the laughter surrounding us,
then say not us but me, I’ll never know your feel, the Typee of tin roof blues, Young
Goodman Brown’s freeway exit deep in the witch-crazed woods where I no longer loiter.

(23 January 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander