Afterglow Surmise, Appraising A Lifetime Of Writing Poems Poem by Warren Falcon

for Viren

'I am sick of this life of furnished rooms...
You know my strange life. Every day brings
Its quota of wrath. You little know
A poet's life, dear Mother: I must write poems,
The most fatiguing of occupations...
I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a café near the post office.' - Delmore Schwartz, from 'Baudelaire'


Dear brother,

this massive mother complex could

not, would not, be worked through

via poetry or booze or rooms chosen

in which to scribble and scribe what

was, as you said, heard in your head

or wherever such are heard


Just to report to you from here, a post

office also near, an ignorant bird on

the escape now makes a music at any

rate as was the mourning dove an hour

ago singing on the other side of pane


knows when to tone in tandem to

poem same or similar each one little

inflections familiar to childhood fields

felt not seen heard not named as if

improvising those few notes available

to doves for late afternoon sun blocked

by curtains green


green too my room

10 years now forced

upon me filled

with poet scrip -


'green how I want you green'1

'not my hands but green across you now'2

'When green was the bed
my love and I laid down upon'3


these and more pay no rent if

only pages were money then


but so many dusty

pantheon-ed singers

hand wringers

bringers on 'of

harbinger dawns'2 dusks


decry what rusty radiators here

might also in their own way suggest

as their heated season nears end,

and mine, what may be known

if ever known of afterglow surmise

when third snows in fever weeks

give surprise for never guessed Bestowals


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1 Lines from poems by (in order of quote) : 1Garcia Lorca,2Richard Hugo, and 3John Wieners

2 'of harbinger dawns' a line, and a reframe, of Hart Crane's poem title, The Harbor Dawn