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22:36:06 Still Sunday, actually Sunday-night.

Reading John Balaban’s poetry I am overcome.

That I might have known him more this time around and do not.

This poem alone makes me want to drive from Boston to North

Carolina just to pay my respects...

R E S P E C T

-Kotatsu John Bailes

Endosymbiosis

Reading an acquaintance’s poetry.

His book of said stumbled upon

while almost packing books

into “categories” or “groupings”

before boxing for moving day.

An acquaintance in this lifetime

but more than likely a dear friend

at some other point in our transmigrations:

humus, moisture, clouds, rain,

trees, grass, oceans, estuaries.

Transmigrating beings bacteria, archaea,

when some lonesome ancient prokaryotic

cell engulfed a bacterium that became

the mitochondrion through which we

met in the process of merging then

parted.

Always remembered.

-Kotatsu John Bailes

Crossing West Nebraska, Looking for Blue Mountain

Where can one find the real Blue Mountain?

Inside the Blue Mountain at Waggoner’s Gap,

is there another, pulsing cool azure light?

Can one drive west and find Blue Mountain?

Will anyone ever live there but me?

Some say that Blue Mountain is very small

and is rocking in the zion of a waterbead.

They claim to find it everywhere , even in clouds

of atmospheric dust snapping with strontium

and settling on the grasslands this evening.

Although Blue Mountain is only as large as a thought,

its sides drop off into dark crags; its steep slopes

are smooth as glass. Its aspect is discouraging.

But from its peak, one can see everything clearly.

In humming fields, beetles, aphids, weevils, ants.

Fox pups frisking in bluebells before their burrow.

A naked boy and a girl dogpaddling an inner tube

in bayou waters, off a levee near Big Mamou.

Subterranean rocks grinding in the San Andreas Fault.

A Malay fisherman, perched on a spit of rock off Penang,

hurling a circling net into surf at sunset.

A bloated mare giving foal in a clover field in Kent.

A blindfolded teenager, shoeless, slumped against a tree

as the firing squad walks of in Montevideo.

Missiles hidden like moles in Siberian silos.

A Black man, in red cotton shirt and khaki pants, his skin

alive with protozoan welts, sipping coffee in a Congo shop.

An eel sliding through a corpse’s yellowed ribs

in a Mekong swamp where frogs croak and egrets fish.

Ice sparkling the coats of hundreds of reindeer with

steaming nostrils, crossing a Lapland river under a moon.

As I pass in the dark through this sleeping town

the only creatures moving on Main Street are moths.

Spinning orbits about the lamps, they fall and die.

Their husks rustle like leaves in the fluorescent light.

Were they flying to Blue Mountain? Am I there?

-John Balaban, from his book Passing Through a Gate: Poems, Essays, and Translations