Understanding
J.B. Hogan
You’re always there with
your poem, as if you wrote it,
like Jack Kerouac beboppin’ 242
choruses for Mexico City or
Neal Cassady walking the San Miguel
tracks to eternity or Chekhov and
Gorki getting schooled by Tolstoi
in the villa at Gaspra, or maybe
George Bernard Shaw wondering
about the anecdote of the jar and
Wallace Stevens and that
large puddle of water or that
weekend in Puerto Escondido reading
Dickens’ life in Spanish missing the
nuances and subtlety of language, and
understanding that something has been
lost in that early night of stars and even if
you brightened up a thousand thousand
Christmas Tree streets with a thousand
thousand lights that no one, not a
living soul, in all that glare, had
any chance whatsoever of understanding.
J.B. Hogan
You’re always there with
your poem, as if you wrote it,
like Jack Kerouac beboppin’ 242
choruses for Mexico City or
Neal Cassady walking the San Miguel
tracks to eternity or Chekhov and
Gorki getting schooled by Tolstoi
in the villa at Gaspra, or maybe
George Bernard Shaw wondering
about the anecdote of the jar and
Wallace Stevens and that
large puddle of water or that
weekend in Puerto Escondido reading
Dickens’ life in Spanish missing the
nuances and subtlety of language, and
understanding that something has been
lost in that early night of stars and even if
you brightened up a thousand thousand
Christmas Tree streets with a thousand
thousand lights that no one, not a
living soul, in all that glare, had
any chance whatsoever of understanding.
