Roberta Gentry, This Concerns All of Us, Write and React, Arts Incubator Gallery, Tucson, AZ, May 2008.

Recently found this gorgeous semi-collaborative piece Roberta Gentry painted for a poem I wrote a few years ago.

Nomadology I(; or, This Concerns All of Us)

This does not concern the silent emissaries
floating in their homemade boats of warehouse shelving
floating toward Yuma and Dubai, and
the rescue of senusalists everywhere.

They are, indeed, not heralds of anything whatsoever.
So this concerns my wandering.  For when it will pass,
for what it will traverse, for the alleys soon locked
by failed transmissions and succeeding parentheses.

This is a forgetting.  One small leap in space
with porous limits and ill-defined rules.  Where
if the cantankerous restlessness pouring out my eyes
is to be believed as the impossibility of universal consent,

then the throwing motion underneath bronze shields
is both an opening and closing to one hundred hands clapping.
But it is not.  There are a few busted filaments, cracked
tires, broken needles, and blown speakers; maybe

thousands of paradoxes inspired by the conundrum of:
high-jumping the state line or roadside Jesus look-alike contests.
Or maybe this is an affirmation of passive reception and
active errantry, lost when the planets first collided,

a sitting still and motioning weakly toward the window–
fallowness another name for meditation.  The balm for
over-traveled feet rests in a god’s medicine cabinet
where it is slowly approaching its expiration date.

There were only a few short yarns spun yesterday.
And the failure to evince the proper emotion
accorded them was something prepared for.
I fall into song and cannot return.