Went Like It Came - Paperback

by Geoffrey O'Brien (Author)

Each of these poems is some sort of story about stories. A crowded city undergoes a spell of enforced confinement. In a war of rumors and conspiracy theories, identities are stolen and shapeshifting outsiders infiltrate urban parks. New fiefdoms consolidate under the sign of pervasive unease. A landscape of dry rivers and toxic weeds reveals itself. Within the zone of isolation, all the stories play out again in the mind, through memory or dream or unexpected waking flash-spectral trespasses, plays staged in empty theaters, messages concealed in drowned books, lives that might have been lived but weren't, hermetic histories, lost paradises continuing to unreel in a subterranean screening room. The stories hang at last on a thread of melody, resolving themselves into a connecting filament that persists even at the core of silence.

The Bed

There are moments

when the sun is nothing

orange glow

staining a blank wall

and the dying see doorways

not visible to others

but cannot enter them

or even stir from the bed

where they beat their hands

against the barrier