November CommQuote

Communications

by Neal Bowers

Sent in after new ground was taken,

my father ducked from ditch to shell-hole,

unwinding the telephone cable behind him,

a pfc. cast as Mercury, connecting

the gods with the lesser gods.

Funny to think of him trailing

the complex filament of speech,

that man, neither shy nor sullen,

who answered only “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,”

and never volunteered a private thought.

Standing off with his hands in his pockets

or cupping a cigarette, he seemed to be waiting

with the great rural patience of fields

for whatever might rise pure and nameless

or fall from the sky beyond explanation.

If anyone asked what he was thinking,

he said, “Nothing,” and when he died

he rushed out leaving everything unsaid,

uncoiling a dark line into darkness

down which a familiar silence roars.

from Out of the South (2002: Louisiana State University Press)

September CommQuote

September's CommQuote is visual, brought to us by Salvador Dali whose late work is being featured at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through January 9, 2011. Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone (1938) is featured in the exhibit and seems to fit nicely with what I look for in good, albeit pictorial, quotes for the blog.

January CommQuote

I think a New Year's resolution for our monthly quote will be to call upon more poetry. Here's an excerpt from a poem by Raul Hernandez Novas featured in THE WHOLE ISLAND: SIX DECADES OF CUBAN POETRY (University of California Press, 2009). The poem is called Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

...Maybe we play in the same park
a mute telephone between us
and electric cord coiled vibrating
working in the white curve of distance
the path at whose end a sad snow falls
the flight of a silent bird
a migratory bird's promise
seen with the soil of Wisconsin my bone gone to pot
a telegram carried by birds and between us
nothing but a shining window
that I pass through without breaking the glass.

--Raul Hernandez Novas, trans. by Mark Weiss