- I. Water Color/Poem
- Sky-blue, haze-blue, sea-blue.
- Tom worked while Preston meditated upstairs.
- They both had been up late.
- Now he sat where he had lain all night
- and looked out the window
- thru Monterey Pines. Sunday,
- a winter morning far from home.
- Green pines, brown trunk, red trunk.
- He had felt this way before,
- after an unexpected debauch.
- Childhood, passive; adolescence, reactive,
- he thought; and now a man
- who realized the limitations
- of home and habit.
- “I move to keep things whole.”
- This was the wholeness of fresh perception.
- Orange sky, yellow haze, there’s a shadow
- and it is blue. On wet paper—
- his long, smooth, cold brush.
- II. Late Night Movies/Poem
- Tom didn’t usually watch television,
- but it was Friday, and he enjoyed the companionship.
- Rose, his housemate, was also watching. She, too,
- could ridicule their common hypnosis with common cynicism.
- After the movie in which the world was blinded
- by meteors and overrun by giant plants,
- even the movie about the hound of hell
- seemed a little funny: an innocence
- to facile against an evil whose sound effects
- were too ominous. But it was gripping;
- who’s to say such things don’t happen—Not Tom,
- who retreated to his bed alone. The cat
- had been put in the garage. In the distance,
- as always if you listen in the suburbs at night,
- a dog barked. What, Tom wondered, did it bark at?
- Did it bark at the wind? Wasn’t there
- anything in the wind for us, too, something
- for which words seem a little silly?
- III. An Identity/Poem
- Tom had had a hard day, or it had him. He sat
- in the late sunlight with his apple, cheese, and tea,
- and shared in the blame for his hunger and fatigue.
- The day had been full of . . . of what? he wondered, while
- the sun moved the shadows of buildings over him—
- work and precious little play, dull boy, work, dull boy,
- and precious little play. Now the breeze and the shade
- made him and his hands cold, his back hurt from the bench,
- and these were the pleasures of being out in it.
- If the birds didn’t chirp for him, at least they chirped,
- and the who-who who of an owl especially
- delighted him, since it was as alone as he.