Under Dead Spotlights
a Saturday morning poem
Well, that was unexpected. My apologies for the brief hiatus.
Hello again, little ghosts. I hope you have been well. I have a new poem for you this week focusing on a simple prompt, inspired by a good conversation. More on that below. No reading list this week, but trust that I will cough up what I owe to y’all soon enough. I need a little bit more time to rest up. The summer is always rough.
As I said, this week’s poem is inspired by a delightful conversation with a coworker. Two writers shooting the shit about the specifically illustrated dread of Blood Meridian and how much of that do we value against the concept that has become the late Mr. Cormac McCarthy. I’ve chewed on exactly 2 chapters of the opus and I’m still clutching at invisible pearls, even on the re-visit.
We drifted, eventually, into a conversation of not what we wrote about, but what we didn’t write about. Both of us admitting that the very things that we love and adore, the things that move us and break us in beautiful ways, cores of our humanities and values, are often what we avoid in subject.
The task feels too big, I said. How could I possibly convey to you what this means to me without a vulnerability that teeters on cringey peaks, friends? And. Who are you to say what it is? These things have been held by you, by all of you, at every stage. Or perhaps it found you at a particular stage that formed you irrevocably. Either way, a terrifying endeavor in our modern days on the Internet.
So, in an attempt to capture what is the definition of “you had to be there.”
An Adaptation of a Design in Time.
Here is a poem about dance.
Be well.
M. I. Kast
Under Dead Spotlights by M. I. Kast
To dance underneath the surface, to float the body in atmosphere. To become vapor corporeal, ephemeral. Unable to be collected, Uncontainable by physical space or measurable Time for longer than a fleeting Day Lily's bloom. The stray cats and possums pose as their only witnesses, wilting at inevitable over-exposure from the dead spotlights above. Memories that form an arabesque in the window with each step. A breeze clears the night. You can see it in the slow blink Kiss from the neighborhood Tom, if you look. Meeting at the tip, the end of his softly-tailed brush Bye on your way home. Tiny time gods on the side walk, Looking both ways before we cross the road.
“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
-Don Delillo, Cosmopolis