Galileo, by Paul Tran

This poem really builds for me. I like the references to the word face throughout and especially the reappearance at the very end. The playfulness with words and line breaks contrasts with despair, for those who know despair. 

Galileo

I thought I could stop
time by taking apart
the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.
Nothing can keep. Nothing
is kept. Only kept track of. I felt
passing seconds
accumulate like dead calves
in a thunderstorm
of the mind no longer a mind
but a page torn
from the dictionary with the definition of self
effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving
on as if nothing happened.
Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed.
Went to work. Went home.
There were parties. Ecstasy.
Hennessy. Dancing
around each other. Bluntness. Blunts
rolled to keep
thought after thought
from roiling
like wind across water—
coercing shapelessness into shape.
I put on my best face.
I was glamour. I was grammar.
Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.
I, too, had been taken apart.
I didn’t want to be
fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless
like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.

Copyright © 2020 by Paul Tran. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.


Fill this faceless space.

The Lover Remembereth Such as He Sometime Enjoyed and Showeth How He Would Like to Enjoy Her Again

I found this poem in the 1980s and neglected to write down who wrote it. Its title paraphrases that of a poem by the 16th-century writer Thomas Wyatt, though this poem turns out wistful rather than sardonic like Wyatt's. It's a sonnet of dive bars and lost love in contemporary language that's easy to understand. The next-to-last line hits me in the heart.

The Lover Remembereth ... 

Luck is something I do not understand:
There were a lot of things I almost did
Last night. I almost went to hear a band
Down at the Swinging Door. I, almost, hid

Out in my room all night and read a book,
The Sot-Weed Factor, that I'd read before.
Almost, I drank a pint of Sunny Brook
I'd bought at the Dickson Street Liquor Store.

Instead I went to the Restaurant-on-the-Corner
And tried to write, and did drink a beer or two.
Then coming back from getting rid of the beer
I suddenly found I was looking straight at  you.

Five months, my love, since I last touched your hand.
Luck is something I do not understand.

Cheers.