John Gallaher
T h e D a n g e r i n P l a n s
If you are just funny enough,
if you can just run fast enough
no one will ever die.
Do you remember that?
And are you better now?
And all our meaning statements.
All our looking at things.
The women laughing around the table
in the kitchen.
Trouble on the way, and great joy.
I’m ok with it, but who’s to know
the way I might feel
back then.
The men standing in the yard,
talking and laughing.
You forgot to watch me close my beautiful eyes,
the unspeaking gods
in a row,
at the edge of anything, toward.
The music of that.
The becoming. And maybe you are there.
Maybe you have ten coins.
M i n n e a p o l i s I s a F i n e C i ty
Or maybe you love me and then you don’t,
or never did, or I you,
and I quietly lose your name
among the correspondences and marjoram.
Up and down the corridors,
grabbing things from filing cabinets,
or hearing people off diving boards,
the sharp then dull cha-chunk up
and then the water
as what the water always does.
Hello and hello to you too. Perhaps
a margarita, or something
alone under its umbrella. Red maybe,
or pink. Your gradations a pale form
of a woman in love. Or fourteen people by the pool
in love with eleven people
with some overlap.
And overlap as a spectator sport, and
spectators as a form of eclipse,
eclipse as a wet bar of sorrow, and all these other ways
no one feels special
on which we hadn’t counted.
Enigmatic draperies.
Pejorative sunsets.
And why be a body at all?
Why be anything?
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