Clayton Medeiros's Shared Poems

Musicians sing and play
At the edge of the bay

I asked you please
To dance with me

In curved night’s
Moonish light

Full of itself once again,
blue-black moony night
joins summer’s march to fall.
The days are counted
in numerical rites of months,
weeks, iambic pentameter,
Sapphic stanzas, free verse,
translated and transported
Across the centuries
To my reading table

The world’s facticity
Presumes available truth
Science’s revelatory methods
Offer a satiety of answers
Yet inscrutable itches
Remain as questions
Endlessly reprised
Leave hearts bereft
Beyond any biology
Inchoate desire
Drives us together
Momentary bliss
Conquers every divide
Like streams and rivers
Race to the sea
We cling to each other
Against indifference

Riding the train from Washington, D.C.
to New York City, childhood memories
rise from the spring woods. No leaves
hide the bright green skunk cabbage
emerging from bedraggled winter leftovers.
Memory rustles boyish searches for
frontier adventures in Connecticut woods.
East coast houses rush by interspersed
with nascent green fields. Soon, the city’s
factories, warehouses, brackish creeks,
rows and rows of junked cars, freight
trains parked in long useless lines,
wait their turn for one more long haul,
run down tenements bereft of possibility.
Manhattan’s sky line in the distance.

As time went on its circular way,
I stopped telling the story. Initially,
listeners became enamored, yet,
were soon lost in my convolutions,
hesitations, moments of ineptitude,
recaps, mythic reconsiderations,
about something I saw just once,
long ago, before I could show them
or anyone else. You had to be there.
Who am I to rustle up data to argue
one way or the other? But I know
what I saw, what happened. I am
condemned to serve as witness,
since no one else was there.