Issue 16, March 1998
Mike Barney - Two Poems

I
					 
What was it Bill Holden
wished for  so wistfully
in PICNIC ?
A job in an office, wearing
a white shirt and tie, not
getting his hands 
dirty?
Well, good luck to him.
I don't know anyone ever born
could scrub hard enough
to get the blood
completely off.

II

Speed kills
in more ways than one.
Humans know
the pulse-pounding, chest-clutching
ragged-breathed truth of this.
God does too.
After all, it took Him
at least 
seven days
and He 
still 
didn't 
get it 
quite 
right.

III
					          
Poetry
is for people
with souls.
People without them
don't need it
any more than
a desert landscape
needs
a monsoon.

IV

The large print giveth
and the small print
taketh away
which is why
in the kingdom of the blind
you damn well better
learn Braille.

V

The color of the body
is irrelevant
to the sun,
moon, stars.
The wind
chills
red yellow black white equally
as the rain wets.
Decomposed, Gaia
accepts us all; an equal-
opportunity composter.
Heaven, too.
Souls are colorblind.

This place has meaning for her
this pile of brick and steel and teaching
sitting quietly at the end
of a tree-lined campus walk

It was her own, personal
hall of academe
this place

To which she came
so many years ago
trailing two toddlers in her wake
like a momma duck with ducklings
a timid young housewife 
shyly searching for something:
an education, a craft, a way through life,
something---
to cast off the weight
of the stone-cold heart
of an unloving spouse, perhaps,
and crawl from the shadow
of his diligent indifference
into the light of her own assurance.

No matter why, 
now
she came.

Came with the voices of children in her head
and visions of the cities of the future
great cities
cities she would learn to build.

And she learned
learned when concrete is a friend 
and when an enemy
learned
which place is good for parks
and which for factories
learned
to curb the raucous ugliness
of commercial strips
with grace-notes:
berms and trees and lighting.

Now
she returns
quietly, briefly
having learned in this place
how to see her visions formed
in steel, in wood, in stone
having dreamt, and built
cities not just to be proud of
but to be lived in
returns 
and looks around
and pronounces nothing changed.