Saturday, January 24, 2015

Rainbow Valley



                                    A dead brother's leather jacket

                                    Stolen from its hook

                                    Zeke's Bar in Colorado

                                    That tree in Rainbow Valley

                                    The thing we can't let go









9 comments:

  1. There is an intrinsic melancholy in this poem, this memory. Rainbow Valley --I remember a Zeke's in Cripple Creek. Is that the one? Colorado's place-names are a whole language of fortune and misfortune. Beautiful poem.

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    1. I believe Zeke's is in Victor, which is just up the road ... a friend lived there and in Cripple Creek in the early '70's. It was his brother's jacket ... :(

      Thanks, Geo. It's a poem I've been wrestling with for a while.

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    2. BTW: the photo is Cripple Creek ... :)

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    3. Maybe that's part of your poetry's allure --it's been so long, so very long since I passed that way. The wonderful little towns, though far apart by California standards, tend to run together in memory-- I wrestle with retentive accuracy, not your poem. Perhaps we should be a tag-team and wrestle other poets.

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    4. That reminds me of something Charles Simic said of himself and Mark Strand, both of whom loved a good meal and often included food in their poems: "We were just a couple of short-order cooks who kept trying to pass themselves off as poets."

      Wrestling: a whole new way of reaching the public. :)

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  2. something precious lost of stolen, former despondent memories never forgotten

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    Replies
    1. They tend to hang on ... Thanks for commenting, Linda.

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