David Graham Verse-Virtual 2017 July

July 2017

A native of Johnstown, NY, I retired in June 2016 after 29 years of teaching writing and literature at Ripon College in Wisconsin. I've published six collections of poetry, including Stutter Monk and Second Wind; I also co-edited (with Kate Sontag) the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Confession. Essays, reviews, and individual poems have appeared widely, both in print and online. In recent years I've spent nearly as much time on photography as poetry. A gallery of my work is online here: http://instagram.com/doctorjazz

Movie Scenes We Won't Be Viewing

Car chase barely begun, our hero steers
smack into a bridge abutment or skids out
into a bicycle rack. Tom Cruise can't get
his seat belt off. Matt Damon leaps roof

to roof but doesn't make it, plunging
with a strangled yelp sixteen floors down,
where he does not land on a cushiony heap
of garbage bags and rise, limping a little

but basically OK. No, he splats like a sack
of potatoes just as you or I would,
and in minute the first rat arrives to nose
the corpse, blood spreading over oily pavement.

Rogue C.I.A. agent shot in the back
while eating a danish at the diner.
Unfortunately, the spray of gunfire also hits
the waitress, who twitches and gurgles

for five minutes before dying. The dark-suited
black-op agents quickly agree on a cover story
before the cops arrive, one of whom does not
recognize the waitress as his long-lost lover

and most assuredly does not pledge right then
to get to the bottom of this death or suspect it was
no accidental cross-fire, and she was somehow
involved in something Big. Instead he smokes

a cigarette while chatting up the agents,
one of whom tells a dirty joke to cut the tension.
The coroner is slow to arrive, but nobody takes
any fingerprints or gives any speeches.

It's dull as a committee meeting. Meanwhile,
cute little Jamie causes a ruckus in the
back seat of a cab leaving the scene, not because
he's being driven away from the only mother

he's ever known, but simply because they
won't let him retrieve his favorite sneakers.
He cries and cries over that, and when
the nice social worker (Sandra Bullock,

in a small role she nonetheless fills
with great moments) tries to console
Jamie, singing him an old song, he calls her
a dirty bitch and won't stop sobbing.

Where I Want My Ashes Scattered

I don't suppose I care much,
come to think of it. I know
I won't care then, once the I
I think I know has turned
gray and flaky, with little chunks
of charred bone and minerals
and, I predict, a hard stony mass
that was my soul, now dense
as a sash weight, and I hope
shiny as a rock lifted from
the river. Glistening so
briefly before the air dries it
back to dullness. But if I had
to name a place, I guess
it would be just off the path
on some walk you love, not
any scenic outlook or holy spring,
but just behind a mossy rock,
maybe, or tucked in the gnarled
roots of a century old pine.

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