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POETRY

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By Murray Silverstein

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The Montréal Review, July 2011

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SCREEN SAVER

 

I got snoozy last night reading Keats on the web, & blip,

my screen saver's Tony Bennett. There he was in Central Park,

blue jogging suit, white stripe, nice bounce to his step-

the old guy looks good -glad-handing my pal-

who'd cried, "Hey, Tony! " turned to me beaming & I snapped.

 

If I could make this laptop sing, I'd mix the Bennett

with the Keats, & when the screen goes blank, up comes

my grinning Mr. B. & out of his eyeball & pulsing in cursive,

a cosmos spells, Darkling, I listen- . Every man's a crooner,

craves before the final snooze, a final choral swoon.

 

Imagine the spawn, Tony & John. Because it's the mind

& it hankers, before the screen goes blank to Google

"On Melancholy," scroll down past sorrow to chew

on the business of bursting Joy's grape. & let -why not?-

the warm Love in- it won't be summer in North Neverland.

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ON HEARING THAT THE NEIGHBOR ON HER DEATHBED TOLD HER

HUSBAND, SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE

 

A year ago, just, we'd fixed the falling down

old fence between us: I'd see her on the other side

all the time, taking in the laundry, calling for the dog.

We did holidays and kids, politics and weather.

 

I knew the church was big for her, but not,

until the funeral, how, I am so dumb: It's the House

of the Word, and once the Word is sung, the choir sang,

on goes the light, and see you on the other side.

 

But outside, this side, caught in the branches

of an empty birch, November light, the fall, a fall

was taking its toll, golden a moment then blown, rainy;

taking until the turn, the turn its tolling tolls

 

when on goes the light, the choir inside sings-

so dumb it's brilliant!-and see you on the other side.

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Murray Silverstein's first book of poems, Any Old Wolf (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2006), was noted in American Poet, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets and received the 2007 Independent Publisher bronze medal for poetry. Also for Sixteen Rivers Press, he has produced the poetry CD, Naming the Rivers (2008), and served as executive editor for the anthology, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010). A practicing architect, he has also co-authored four books on architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press, 1977).

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