"adamson" poems
“We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits in slithered and too ample pockets.”
Hart Crane, “Chaplinesque”
A footstool in the desert.
A napkin in the netherworld.
A coffee stain in the margin.
Perfumed remains.
Systematic garnish.
Dorothy Stratten climbing Mt. Suribachi.
My late father’s toenail clippers.
Pale clouds over Slauson Avenue on the day after the L.A. riots.
A rhetoric of purpose.
A philosophy of decay.
A poem written to an audience of one.
©David Adamson 2015
Sep 27, 2015
Sep 27, 2015 at 8:33 PM UTC
Mountains swell, knuckle, roll.
Foothills slope and slide.
Canyons fold, streams bend,
Salt marshes wrinkle and sink.
These pagan forms alone gave shape
To this valley before God’s people arrived.
Not until the Saints brought
Rectilinear rectitude
And wrote a grid into this arid soil
Did this place become the land of God.
My parallel brethren,
North Temple, First South,
We will meet in eternity.
And now do I sustain the men
Who bear the Logos
From the mountain to the desert,
Past Saint and Mason, Catholic and Jew
And, unbending, reveal
That the straight line is an act of God.
©David Adamson 2015
Sep 27, 2015
Sep 27, 2015 at 10:26 AM UTC