Boogie Poem by robert dickerson

Boogie

Rating: 5.0


Summers' end
what song to sing?
the squawk-chop of the cicadas?
doomed choir, a bit too stoic and remote.
No, as the sun burns optimistically into my back
and the season turns a notch
let us sing the song of the roller blades.

Of the wheelsong:
little cries, battalions of them,
aiming themselves, casting themselves forth
virtually frictionless;
casting and coasting,
hayfoot, strawfoot, hay...
over an asphalt run
hung over with voluble leaves,
sough, sough...through an azure park, smooth,
wheel-worn but clean.

Not the song of the flights of the birds-
There is a time for that, next week, perhaps,
not yet, those arpeggios of silences
resonant vacancies, empty echoes,
all uncomfortably greek.

Of the...
singing like a swarm
of late-summer bees

And the wheel so generous a thing:
giving and bouncing back,
quashed then off
momently and again,
keen to swerve, to stop short-
what flexibility!

The song of the roller blades

amicably cruising
onward and on
bearing up sinewy calves and shins
and scarred knees, undaunted,
you and your riders,
each a Sisyphus in reverse
chasing a pomander of alspice, grand as a panda,
named Summer
eternally downhill-
a flowerfull time.

Summers' end what
song not
the song of the garden weeping, sensing its own end;

but of the rollerblades
of metals' shrill squeal
of the man in shades
panting, collapsed, stretched out on the grass
searching with one blind finger for that only station
aired from where seas are always warm and unfreezing
and the days are blown backwards like sands.

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