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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
2026/11/0140 分