Dancin' Moon Songcast Ep. 65 I Don't Need Poetry & Quoting Robert Burns | POETRY SERIES EPISODE!

Lyrics, poems & episode notes

Written content from the original Podbean episode; not a recording transcript.

I Don't Need Poetry

I don't need poetry

unless it scratches secretly on my window.

I open the door

to discover it was only wind.

I don't need poetry

until it doesn't want my observation anymore.

when I lower my eyes

it stretches great wings across the sky.

I don't need poetry,

and I say that with the best intentions.

I retract it

when it lies cold in my hands.

I don't need poetry

unless it slopes up along the edges

so the heaviest words

get trapped when it begins to spin.

I need poetry...

like I need a small, white dove

winging hither an olive garnish

for this silver platter beneath my chin.

Quoting Robert Burns

It began with the woman in the commercial:

she had dirty socks

her boy had played

baseball-in-the-mud

as all AMERICAN boys do...

We had turned the set on

leaving the room to do our other business and

leaving it to its covertly explicit ramblings,

when suddenly childlike, percipient...

she began quoting Burns without a brogue

like making faces in the car on the highway

without adjusting the rearview mirror

to see them anymore:

doing the thing just to do it

not to keep sane on a long trip or

to try out different smiles

to use in public or

to sell detergent.

Of course I was not there,

otherwise it would have been tainted

as all commercials are having more to do with

the fat man in the biggest office

than with clean socks or

AMERICAN boys who, of course,

play baseball-in-the-mud.

*****

It was night

over the rows of dry cornstalk arms

(broken into elbows just above the surface)

snow was the promise for that night

and my truck whined down the highway

either side black as the

edge of a mattress

until

a glowing green house emerged orange

in the starboard vastness of dead

fields... Life was there:

roses, mums, zinnias, tulips

perhaps even strawberries or beans

In the darkness, the elbows

shuddered beneath the first flakes.

As I turned off the radio,

I believe my face glowed dimly in the mirror by

the dashboard lights...

Life was there.

The snow came secretly, later that night

rendering the stalk-arms overtly implicit

within the whiteness:

symbol of the housewife

with a million dirty socks

and no more commercial

to let her know,

quoting Burns without a brogue,

giving up on the impossible purity of snow

in anything too ulterior--- too

prepared.

But no one heard the woman or the

stalk's movement.

I make my faces alone

without even the eye of the mirror,

quoting Burns just because it's Burns.