RSS 2.0 FeedGoverned by Chance
It is the day Stewart needed help carrying boxes
from his old residence to his new home.
It has not yet happened. He has not yet asked my help
carrying boxes down two flights of stairs
and placing them in the back of his truck.
This is because the house waits for him
to notice his name upon the mail box
or that its street number is his favorite number,
even if the instant he reads the five digits
is the instant he knows it to be his favorite number.
The walls are some shade of sky blue
that exists only at seven twenty-three a.m. on April ninth,
with inexpensive prints of Van Gogh’s haystacks
tacked to the wall to cover where the board is dented
from thrown objects missing their intended target.
The woman who was the target
returns to the house after midnight
having seen the reflection of her frayed nerves
in water beneath the flamingos’ long legs
at the zoo with her three children
of three different fathers the day before yesterday.
She returns from the neighborhood where she remembers
laughter residing on a clothes rack in a resale shop
and she purchases that laughter and wears it
to be a sun that dissipates her morning fog.
Stewart will like this woman’s skin,
for both its dark color and the story her scars tell,
when they meet at the city landfill while discarding
the last vestige of their pasts that prevent them from seeing
that they truly live in heaven, which, for them,
exists beyond a field of pungent haystacks
in the guise of a home with sky blue walls
and a five-digit address that wins the only lottery
they ever wanted to play.
Kenneth P. Gurney writes for the joy of it, the simple feeling of grace that comes from the creative process. He utilizes the creative process (its current incarnation: writing poetry) for the same reason birds flap their wings, dolphins swim and young men chase after young women – it is hardwired into his DNA. Gurney, consciously, puts forth no philosophy, but he has noticed some themes in his writing over the years: creating his own mythos, spiritual self-exploration, reinvesting the world with a sense of magic or mystery, enjoying the delight of surrealist juxtapositions, and the clarity of Magritte’s painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). He has not thought about what he hopes to achieve by writing poetry – recognition and some definition of success would be nice, but they are not really goals – the writing process takes place daily; Gurney grows in new and, sometimes, unanticipated ways.