A Poem By John Gallaher

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

As All Generalizations Are False

You’re there with that crazy, hell-bent old friend of yours
who’s now calmed down and grown up. Sure it’s great
to see him or her doing well, but you
can’t help but feel things were more interesting
back in the day. No view, then, can encompass the whole. It
can’t be nailed down. You’re feeling kind, so you
say nothing. Bicycles go by with the houses. The world is a matter
of yellow and red fire hydrants. You turn the block
from white houses to yellow houses. The patterns
partially repeat, but never quite. And your
former crazy friend is feeling kind. Let’s stumble
upon greatness, or stumble over the toys the kids left out,
and then into greatness, some deep universal order
beneath the random distribution of corners and points
across the room. We’ll then call it “seemingly
random,” not really random at all, in the form
of rectangles and darkness, some doorknobs,
where it’s us going back and forth, as a sort of
pendulum, as a chase scene from Scooby-Doo, caught up
in the long hallway. At some point I’ll stand by your side. At some point
you’re chasing the monster, and then the monster’s
carrying you, and then you carry the monster, and then
you’re chasing the lines in the carpet. So a monster
is chasing you. It can wear many faces, supplied by various rooms
in a catalogue. A thrift store erupts next to a pawn shop. I’m
too tired to list them. Do we really need images,
anyway? Something to mess up the sand
at the well? So we shine on. Your old friend
boards a train. I’ve been living in my own world
too long, she or he says. And she’s not waiting anymore. He’s
not waiting anymore. We hear them from their compartments,
softly, and it organizes the view out the window. Yes,
but that’s a local phenomenon, like when you’ve just met
and you still remember everything so far. It’s clever of you
to think so, as a thought experiment, where you
can follow the order of operations, saying “what you see
is what you see,” and then “what am I looking at,” and then
“what did I mean,” “where was I.”

John Gallaher’s most recent book is Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, co-written with G.C. Waldrep.

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You may contact the editor at [email protected].