Poem

POEM

There was something I can't bring myself
to mention in the way the light
seemed trapped by the clouds,
the way the road dropped
from pavement to dirt and the land from pine
to scrub-
the red-headed vultures on dead animals,
the hatred of the waitress breaking

a cup and kicking the shards across the cafe
that looked out on the mountain and on the white smear
of the copper mine that sustained these people.
I claim there was something you wouldn't
have wanted to speak of either,
a sense of some violent treasure
like uranium waiting to be romanced
out of the land...

They sat under white umbrellas,
two or three together, elbows on card tables
at the dirt roads leading to the mines,
rising each at his turn to walk
around a while with a sign
accouncing they were on strike,
their crystalline and indelible
faces in the hundred-degree
heat like the faces of slaughtered hogs,
and God forgive me,
I pulled to the side of the road and wrote this poem....


right there in the moment of sadness and longing,
could you relax and touch the limitless space
of the human heart? -Pema Chodron


Denis Johnson

Posted over on Leonard Cohen Forum