RETURN MAIL: A Poem (After a Letter of Affliction*)

Photo by Bobby Ong Jr.

RETURN MAIL
(After A Letter of Affliction)

I, an old man,/ a dull head among windy spaces.
--- T. S. Eliot, Gerontion


It’s noisy with the sound of trucks leaving
the stripped quarry like some la femme du nuit
looking spent in a small circle of melted sheets
not unlike this barricade of trees fencing me in
when I should be out among the cormorants
molesting errant crayfish on the breakwater
boulders, clamping them with the vise grip
of beak before dumping them back into
a cocktail of blackened pools and fetid algae,
my vaunted daiquiri or limey brew on my
long vacation by the sea.

Now you write to ask if it was not too late
to take this one? Porquoi pas?

For hearts frozen with regrets and hollow
memories, it is finally too late, mon amour,
because this thaw among sandpipers and gulls
is also the noise of quarry trucks cracking
the hard-earned quietude that has come
as an ebbtide when the crushing gulfstream
has cut the sandbars and left the stripped
quarry to cover sand holes rending flaccid
haunches and dying loins. It is too late.



--- ALBERT B. CASUGA
Mississauga, Ont. 02-17-11

Poem triggered by these images
It’s in the 40s and noisy with the sound of trucks. Each tree stands in a small circle of melted ground like a bear balancing on a unicycle.---Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 02-11-11 (http://www.morningporch.com/)


* Luisa Igloria, Via Negativa (http://www.vianegativa.us/)