FOUR POEMS
by Bob Grumman

 

. .

 

POEM'S CALIFORNIA CAREER

For hours
a telephone's unlocatable ringing
kept the beach and the parasols
flapping through
the eyesight the ocean
had been for so long
struggling to become.

 

BEACHSCENE

Champion Florida Sun;
barnyard sea
rollicking with yachts;
and heron,
motionless,
at the water's edge to the right
of a deserted pier
two octaves below Stonehenge;
but Poem was thinking of skirts unpursued,
and whether he'd ever get laid again.

 

26 OCTOBER 1993

Poem, a beggar-woman two voices
previously, then crow,
shrieked like both at once
over the ashes of his mother
unable to wonder
even the outline
of any kind of re-attachment
that seemed possible in a rational universe
or that would not take
all meaning out of earthly existence
and anything that could follow it
in an irrational one.

 

ON THE TOILET

Between movements, it occurred to Poem
with an almost-blinding certainty
that his were the most superb lines of verse
in the history of the cosmos.
He chuckled as he thought of how long
it would take the rest of the world
to realize this.

 


Copyright © 2004 by Bob Grumman

Sources:

Bob Grumman: Of Poem
DBQP
Schenectady, NY
Copyright © 1995, Bob Grumman

Reprinted as an on-line chapbook by Stick Press.
For the whole book, go to Stick Press’s site

This is a cooperative presentation of
The Institute for Broken and Reduced Languages
And Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry

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