Chris Stroffolino, p.4
HISTORY, FROM HOW TO WHO
Sleep through thunder, snarl in snow
subjectival and conceptive
the thoughts that (luckily) fail
to build a mind in which to live.
Reader! it’s okay if your rain is my rain,
but I wouldn’t recommend it—
Better my rain be your drizzle
falling gently perhaps on the umbrella
leaning over the frosted glass from which you guzzle.
Thus, if I were to walk out into myself,
the below freezing self that February has brought back
to bracket, there’d be no rain but snow,
& not the kind that lands on the roof of the 40 story Time Life
only to become rain when it meets the street,
but the kind that can’t become rain
even when it lands in the deepest well
iced-over though closer to the molten core
as I become to myself.
It still makes me laugh (that it makes me angry)
that some find within the self
a bridgeable, erasable, distance
while you may ride your trike to Peru
and I hop on a plane, or go through the hall,
to get to my living room
from the bedroom that’s too busy being an office
to be a music room for the moment.
I will disappear when it’s a music room again
but the discrepancy is only erasable by death
and something worse than death
worse than the worst specificity
will better me in the hallway
I only share with those
I don’t know enough to snow
Sleep through thunder, snarl in snow
subjectival and conceptive
the thoughts that (luckily) fail
to build a mind in which to live.
Reader! it’s okay if your rain is my rain,
but I wouldn’t recommend it—
Better my rain be your drizzle
falling gently perhaps on the umbrella
leaning over the frosted glass from which you guzzle.
Thus, if I were to walk out into myself,
the below freezing self that February has brought back
to bracket, there’d be no rain but snow,
& not the kind that lands on the roof of the 40 story Time Life
only to become rain when it meets the street,
but the kind that can’t become rain
even when it lands in the deepest well
iced-over though closer to the molten core
as I become to myself.
It still makes me laugh (that it makes me angry)
that some find within the self
a bridgeable, erasable, distance
while you may ride your trike to Peru
and I hop on a plane, or go through the hall,
to get to my living room
from the bedroom that’s too busy being an office
to be a music room for the moment.
I will disappear when it’s a music room again
but the discrepancy is only erasable by death
and something worse than death
worse than the worst specificity
will better me in the hallway
I only share with those
I don’t know enough to snow