Two poems from Jim Daniels’ Having a Little Talk With Capital P Poetry, the titular piece and also “Ariel View of Warren, Michigan.” One poem by me, possibly influenced in some oblique way, by Daniels’ “Ariel View,” its “An Aerial Photo of the Cincinnati Subway.”
An Aerial Photo of the Cincinnati Subway
all those poems I wrote about living in the sky
were wrong, all those would-be-blues sang
ears so deaf they hung like withering ferns from this
fine cheek-boned male, I come from
Cleveland, for reverie, come for
business, come, that one pleasure, come
home from the effervescent sky. Heritage
transcends flesh, isn’t bloody lineage rooted in rock,
an aerial photo of some rocky mausoleum,
Crusaders’ bones Mistletoe-ing their way around
the Ohio River, where above, bodies of the living
kiss –– nothing of the world around I’ve seen
Lebanon & Ohio, different than Lebanon, Ohio,
a cedar securing my shape into a Mediterranean
coastline, murmuring not cedar but fir grows shade
around my Ohio body. To cut tradition out of
rock, incomplete subway held up only by
roots tying a You & a Me to the sky–
ward facing ground we love upon.
