Poem # 23: I'm Listening

From your eyes an entire city appeared
as I listened to you sing my praises.
The rain had stopped. Its last drops
quietly spelled out my faults.
Your words were pedestrians
passing in the street.
Some I knew and some I did not.
Your eyes seemed more distant
than the bridge lights.
People joined us in the bar,
leaning their umbrellas by the entrance.
Some would later be abandoned.

*

This one has nothing much to do with my present-day reality; but a lot of the poems I've written over the past year or so revisit my youth -- seventies, eighties -- and this one is vaguely (in my own mind, anyway) Manhattan, my geographic and emotional center of existence, long ago (though I haven't visited in nearly twenty years).

Also, it's an experiment in capturing nuance, of balancing interior and exterior. If I have any religion, it's animism: everything's alive, and participating in our mental/emotional lives. Yes, that chair you stubbed your toe on is malicious! And when someone's breaking up with you (or trying to), yes, the rain is in on it, and every stranger, too.

Ruskin called this the Pathetic Fallacy, but most artists know it's merely human, not fallacious.