f-o-r-e-v-e-r

for my sister.

Can you shake out this forever over mythological railings

and not have it hold the musk of under-arms like a leopard printed sweater dress?

Can you turn it loose, this forever, in a field then call it back

like the boomerang never did?

Does it grow sadder, gloomier and calamitous,

evoke supernatural  occurrences of hostility/?

Will it fill a perfectly good slave ship with forgotten souls,

throw the mutinous, the feverish overboard?

Can forever dance a holy-ghost dance with the bishop

of the governing diocese?

Does it consider itself strong?

Can you piss it off like a demi-god?

Can it corrode like a 06 Chrysler, Town and Country?

Take the bait like a walleye?

Cough up blood like a virus? Can

you write poems from the lap of forever?

Avoid disaster from it's hip?

Do you pass it, reeking on the grate in front of Prada?

Is it the creepy neighbor who's mother died alone?

Can you wave to it from a fo'csle?

Can you dive from a shore in the deep and retrieve it?

Is it bizarre and bivouacked after the torrent?

Can you walk the length of a season

on its iron knee?

Is forever when you have teeth or dentures?

Is it prehistoric and leather cool like Miles?

Is forever washable and if so, does it ever retain its color?

Or

is it the maddest kind of magic; can it make the woman torn and

cut in halves

reappear?

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

Forever is, ostensibly, a big thing, beyond our measurement or understanding, at yet here it's questoned and evaluated in terms of the everyday (the sweater dress, the '06 Chrysler), or at least nothing more eternal than a demi-god (maybe forever is just another way to whitewash and obfuscate?) The nod to the old magician's trick of sawing a woman in half is just priceless--and if anyone knows about "the maddest kind of magic", it's you.

[JC]

I'm picturing you in a fever with Miles spinning in the background, you possessed by the notes like Kerouac and pondering time and meaning like a mad crazed Sartre watching the world go by like a play, the actors melting and rising for everyone and no one able to grasp forever....cept maybe some Buddha monk in a cave but his lips are sealed...always happy to come by for a read here.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

i wish it were washable..and that it was permanent press...cause there are so many wrinkles in forever...and so many people wear out without getting a chance at forever...
their seasons end before they can walk them...

i have lost too many friends before their time should have been up....

and i wish they could reappear.

again, such thoughtful words to ponder, as always.

[Delmar Cooper]

This makes forever, which is the exact measurement of the distance between right now and that's all, seem exciting anyway it excites me.

[Horizon K.]

Is forever washable and if so, does it ever retain its color?
Or
is it the maddest kind of magic; can it make the woman torn and
cut in halves

reappear?

I love this poem Dana... The questioning structure of it, pulls the reader deep into the poem... and makes me think of Diego's "Goodbye", my own "Were"... But that aside...

I believe that this forever, can be a true place, for the rare and exquisite, if promised. Even in endings, when hope and resilience and fight are lost, love itself can exist on its own plane, of forever. It can live there eternally, maybe frozen in state, or maybe it's color can change, shifting from red to blue to untaintable white. And maybe by some magic of someday, like comets returning or stars realigning, it can be called back-- make what was lost, reappear...