In a Landscape: XXXIV
       

If things contain their opposites, why bother? That suffices, I guess,
to get a certain type of party going, or to get another type of party
to come to a screeching halt. More like a pregnant pause, most likely,
suggesting a medical term for it. And what other important questions
are there, after that? What to name the baby? Who's the father?

Moving along and being nice to other people helps. For instance,
say we're at the hospital. Depending on how one thinks
of such things, we could be most anywhere. Say we're in Maryville,
MO, then, and we bring all of history along, some way
to care for each other. And the other history, the one
that no one knows about, we bring that too. Now we're all there,
and there's my MRI to look at. And music above us
somewhere, so that every now and then
we get the feeling it's a production number, where we can hide
awhile from literature, and the peppy music bodes well for us
as we catch ourselves humming along about going through the desert
on a horse with no name. Or, a few years earlier,
we're in the emergency room for the first time with our first child,
who's sick, and her temperature spikes to 104. We're terrified
in the same way everyone else is terrified.

The point is always this. The pianos are all prepared differently,
but served the same way. Something must remain
constant. And it's nice to think of us there humming along,
with perhaps a bit of lyric, as if the whole point of our lives
was to travel a great distance to fill these four minutes and eleven seconds
with this peppy song where it feels good to be out of the rain.

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Copyright © 2012 John Gallaher All rights reserved
from Crazyhorse
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission