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Today's poem is by Eric Ekstrand

The Nemesis of Weekends
       

Monday through Friday
In lighterage reports

Or the garlic presses
Of kitchen sink

Dramas or the finchy
Women at the desks

Or the linsey-woolsey
Problem in the bed,

A discontent
Back-and-forth

Is the Nemesis of Unlinked
Home and Work. But we will

Look at the Nemesis
Of Weekends. Lissome

The mother and the sheets
Are indistinct in their line

Of retreat into the day.
Gregory, this nemesis, has braceleted

The mother and father
Together in the Saturday

That lapses to Monday
And is a kind of mezzanine

Or midfield. Philter
Of lunch on the porch,

Peppered tomatoes.
The father's microgravity

Of beer and sexual longing
Lead him, incomplete, in circles

Around the Saturday
As a cloud-appearance, not really

Furthered at all. There is
Endless permission

And no supporting structure.
It is not a house

So much as a marina
Of Mars-orange light where

Every person is an almost-entity
Or the mention of a person.

For a minute, something
Comes into focus:

The open texture
Of a glass vase

And the polyrhythm of blue
And white tile among which the mother

Intended to make a joke, that's all.
There is fruit

And wood around
The remediless joke and a little

Offshoot of silence
In the backyard

And a melon-colored bird.
Newfangled means "worded"

As in "of the fang." New, here,
Means "unfamiliar"—it was

Hard to recognize
The mother in the words,

Which were the publication
Of some old pre-thought.

The riverscape Saturday
Or the airy church architecture

Saturday or the father's
Brown study Saturday

Were not in sequence
With the other days, but

Were stopgaps with no sense of what
Was previous or will be next.



Copyright © 2015 Eric Ekstrand All rights reserved
from Laodicea
Omnidawn
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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