SuhailDwight Peck's reprint series

Bananas #2

Two poems (1973)


Bananas was edited and published by Suhail Hanna in the early 1970s, at the Kickapoo Spur Press in Oklahoma.

D.C. Peck

ON READING

Pondering Apuleius -
Prancing through Aquinas -
Any hour, day or night,
Reading.

I love to read and don't care what.
Laughing along with Schopenhauer,
Weeping Christ's Tears with old Tom Nashe -
Oh you can find me, anytime,
Reading.

White whales, seagulls, bunny rabbits, Death -
Wall Street, Main Street, Paradise, and hell,
Congo journeys, night flights, seven against Thebes -
I was there. And
I am Samsa, Sorel, Raskolnikov, and Huck,
Bertrand Russell, Agamemnon, Chichikov, Dax -
Protean me, fancy me all these.
I am all of these.

I am not me, and would not be,
And will not be, why should I?
Myself, I am nothing, even less than that;
Who would check me out?
But as long as there is one book left,
I can say - "Why not?"
As long as there is one book left,
I will still be here,
Reading.

VIEWING THE BODY

I can see in the dark.
No,
I can look in the dark.
But if I cannot see, yet I can look.

When one's father dies,
One's first thought is to avert one's eyes;
But instead, I looked.
I saw him up there, flat in the dark like a disused airstrip,
Flowers, that should have wilted, but did not, all around;
I saw him; even in the dark, I saw;
I even saw him breathing -
Of course he wasn't breathing,
Another trick the dark plays - and I saw him smile,
Very faintly, smiling at me staring
At him smiling,
But I stared.
Of course he wasn't smiling, what's
To smile about? Me staring,
Not believing what I saw?

But really, I saw nothing.
But I can look.



bookpen.gif (2870 bytes)Please do not reproduce this text in any form for commercial purposes. Feedback and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative, . All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Published in about 1973, posted here 23 August 2003.


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