(shared by a friend from poetry class)

The Man with the Hearing Aid

A man takes out his hearing aid
and falls asleep, his good ear deep
in the pillow. Thousands of bats
fly out of the other ear.
All night they flutter and dive
through laughter, catching the punch lines,
their ears all blood and velvet.
At dawn they return. The weary squeaks
make the old stone cavern ring
with gibberish. As the man awakens,
the last of the bats folds into sleep.
His ear is thick with fur and silence.

At the Office Early

Rain has beaded the panes
of my office windows,
and in each little lens
the bank at the corner
hangs upside down.
What wonderful music 
this rain must have made
in the night, a thousand banks
turned over, the change
crashing out of the drawers
and bouncing upstairs
to the roof, the soft
percussion of ferns
dropping out of their pots,
the ball-point pens
popping out of their sockets
in a fluffy snow 
of deposit slips.
Now all day long,
as the sun dries the glass, 
I’ll hear the soft piano 
of banks righting themselves,
the underpaid tellers
counting their nickles and dimes.

From the wonderful Fitzgerald:

“I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.”

“It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

and e.e. Cummings’ somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

somehwere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands