Poetry

A Poem about the Impossibility of Poetry

by
James Lineberger

 

Try this try
recalling that moment when you
were eight or nine when
the sky went carmine with the setting sun
and you saw a great blue heron
angle up
against the panoply of nature's canvas
try that and try
this moment of respite when
all the joy
you've known comes back to you full-grown
only now you are not
just yourself but the heron and the blazing sky
and the blades
of grass and the shoreline of silhouetted pines and the sheer
giddiness of creation in its fulfillment
in that technicolor vault
where there are no words at all not one
to capture even a dust mote
suspended over the backwaters of the river
that became the lake that became the placid polluted spring
where we dumped our everything
save the lasting lilygrowth of memory

James Lineberger is a professional playwright and screenwriter. He was Playwright-in-Residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis for three seasons. His rock opera, The Survival of Saint Joan, was developed at the Buffalo Studio Arena and the production transferred to Broadway. His screen adaptation for Twentieth Century Fox of the Devery Freeman novel, Father Sky, was filmed as Taps.

His poems have appeared in the Berkely Poetry Review, The Centennial Review, Exquisite Corpse, Hanging Loose, Hayden's Ferry Review, The New Laurel Review, New York Quarterly, Ontario Review, Oxford Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Snake Nation Review, Sonora Review, Verse, and a number of online publications, most of which may be found via Google.