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enjoy this writing from Ralph Monday in the free Down in the Dirt 2014 PDF file chapbook: The Girl Next Door and Other Poems (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2014 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book The Girl Next Door and Other Poems

Order this writing in the book What Must be Done (a Down in the Dirt July - Dec. 2014 collection book)		get the 372 page July - Dec. 2014 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Figures in a Landscape

Ralph Monday

Dying, the malignant disease taught her about love,
where in life she knew often times the meaning of hate.
Her first view had come as a teenager at the drive-in,
which she articulated over a shake later at the diner.
She spoke that the fantasy of mom and pop at home
is the oldest, the deepest of all human wounds.

The unskilled incision was made in all our gardens
before we were born. Potted seed which grew like a
tattered umbrella that could not shield us from atmospheres
not of our making. A kind of prescient digital pop music
throbbing through veins, desert looming outside the garden,
thin human voices scratched out on a slowing gramophone.

Coughing she said that all of this outside the window is a needle
pushed down deep inside, welling blood, that even the most Victorian
sensibilities cannot stem, for the story is DNA stitched,
embroidered within all the songs sung of our sad tales.
Do not cry for the weak, nor pity the insane. We are all related
by the cracked marrow of dry and empty bones.

She said in sure cadences of the convinced, this now is my passion
to walk with ghosts on Calvin’s landscape where the firmament
above will be the mind’s cleansed and empty furnaces,
threads of all human desire realized as deeply connected filaments,
sinew and ligament burnt through by all the dying fires.
This is the place of snow and ice, of bare and distant trees.

From the beginning, with uncertain step, we have all plodded
toward this ambiguous landscape as if to ascertain
whether or not this is love’s desire, hate’s relinquishment, pleaded
do not make us unreal, for we have in blindness apotheosized
that uncaring dark, become squeaking clowns carnivaled
by lusts and fantasies, seeking always to be entertained.

Neither science nor savagery can guide these figures.
We dance and stumble within and without nature,
throbbing always to shape, like potter’s clay, the landscape
that cannot be. Tilled with ploughs, watered with pots, the mind
is the center of all drapery feeding on futile distractions,
the land a faded road that cannot be owned.

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