ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Daniel M. Shapiro is the author of several books and chapbooks, including How the Potato Chip Was Invented and Heavy Metal Fairy Tales. He is a special education teacher who lives in Pittsburgh.
Also by Daniel M. Shapiro:
The Orange Menace
Heavy Metal Fairy Tales
How the Potato Chip Was Invented
Dionne Warwick Records “This Girl's in Love with You”
Dionne Warwick Records “The Windows of the World”
Clouds set guitars on their sides,
cream binding separating
sunset from rush-hour gray,
the idling of tremolo.
Everybody knows
the changes, the slip
of a slash chord
between oil on oil,
rain’s final exile.
The bluest height
holds up a voice
that coolly whispers
over impatient revs.
Everybody knows
how easy it is
to descend,
to crawl down
soft hills of strums.
It’s impossible to look
through a single drop.
The drop will bind
an entire landscape.
Everybody knows
what it takes
to evaporate, what
weaves smog into
broken skins of trees.
I've written several poems about Dionne Warwick because I love her as a performer. I don't think anyone else could've sounded like a natural performing the often asymmetrical songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David — music so complicated, so heartbreaking. It's as good as anything that came out in the 1960s. In this poem, I wanted to mask my unabashed feelings about Warwick by mixing them with nature, a common poetry theme I typically try to avoid, perhaps because nature poems seem to have an unnaturally high bar to be considered good. I suppose I consider songs such as "Windows of the World" as majestic and beautiful as people consider acts of nature. Another thing I wanted to try was to repeat words from the song that bothered me: "Everybody knows." I don't know if David meant the lyric to be ironic, but I don't think there are many things everybody knows. That notion suggests a level of shared comfort I'm not comfortable accepting.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
