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 Dwight
Peck's reprint series
Bananas #2
Two
poems (1973)
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Bananas
was edited and published by Suhail Hanna
in the early 1970s, at the Kickapoo Spur Press in Oklahoma.
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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.
 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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