Sometimes we cannot tell thunder from bombing practice
at the Air Force base, just as sometimes
the opposite is true, and thunder practice over the million
base acres causes young airmen the same confusion.
Their gunships rattle both ways.
Destruction is a corridor with a fire at both ends.
Confusion is an overheated room in which others
say they are too cold.
Glasses stacked at home or lined like armies in the cabinet
are like hydroid zoophytes,
colonies of glass in which both thunder and bombing
resonate alike, and from them dozens of rainbows dropped
by their lips jitter on the walls. 
Vorticella filled with Zinfandel.  A toast to the past Cartesian,
to the anthropologist comparing skulls; forensics
matching shell casings; to the vast success of a philosophy
in which one only has two choices:  talking in our sleep
or the other way around,  both comforting but false.

 

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Allan Peterson is the author of Anonymous Or;  Chapbooks: Stars On A Wire; Small Charities. Recent Print: Gettysburg Review; Many Mountains Moving; West Wind; Arts & Letters; Northwest Review; Jabbwerwock; Belleview Literary Review

Recent Online : Agni; Blackbird; Drexel Online Journal; Stickman Review; The King's English; Story South; Typo

Work forthcoming in: Prairie Schooner; Beloit Poetry Journal; Mid America Review; Octopus

Awards:  2002 Arts & Letters Poetry Prize; Florida Arts Council Fellowship; NEA Fellowship

Note- Defined Providence Press has ceased publication. But you can order Anonymous Or from Allan Peterson, 5397 Soundside Drive,
Gulf Breeze, FL 32563   apeterson71@mchsi.com  850-932-3077 (h)  850-484-2554 (w)

Click here to read more poems by Allan Peterson in ForPoetry.com

 

ForPoetry