When Unexpectedly Confronted with Nature Died With Sunflower by Michael Cooper
.
Last Break, as viewed from My Cell Sometime after 4PM:
When Unexpectedly Confronted with Nature Died With Sunflower
i.
Yes I too see it now in the raw
beauty of the track homes
all-grid
in both the vertical and the horizontal planes-people
their forks dangling from
the cruciform phone lines
and those of power
in the natural extension of the red
wood and the pines
into the spines upright
lances of business
men and the dwellings where they stand or
sleep it takes courage
to see this continuous
beauty
not the demarcation of human
and nature between which no line of distinction
can be drawn but between the non-gold
of the sunflower and the bold color of the sky
that entombs her.
ii.
Hold a pixilated stare
of the sunflower and the bold color of the sky
that entombs her in these rigid fields that you thought straight-
jacketed her until the cracks appeared
in the paint of the wood plank
fences sparked with superficial
erosion which showed you no
such regularities until the splinter entered your hand
split our dimensions or beings
but that these fields declare themselves open and full
in and of themselves queer
and each snared irregularity is a better signifier
for the purposeful decay of the old ways
like water
in the bottom of the glass
where the once milk is suspended by its own nippled levity
caked into milk-white clay
and as unthinkably undrinkable
as the low slung
crossbeam
of this cuneiform sky above us.
...
Michael Cooper is an inland empire poet, PoetrIE Historian, and father to two great sons: Markus & Jonathan. His book, coauthored with good friend Cindy Rinne, entitled Speaking Through Sediment, is now available from ELJ Publications. For more poems and ideas please visit his blog. Michael also is the chief writer and curator of Fracture Tentacle, a monthly video series on Youtube.
