![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.walterbargen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/Harmonicimage.jpg\" "\\"Harmonicimage\\"")
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Timberline Press, 59 pages, 2001
\nOut of print.<\/p>\n
Selections:<\/p>\n
IN HARMONY<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This is occupied country. The streets are windswept The retired town planner TO PUT BY<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n He walks to the back of the house he\u2019s lived in all his life and finds a room that he\u2019s never entered. He opens the door and feels along the wall for the light switch. How strange to work both his palms over something cold, flat, vertical, and in the pitch of darkness, extending to the infinity of corners. For a moment, he\u2019s falling upward, sideways, and down. He secures his feet to the floor and turns. Something long and thin brushes his cheek. He spins from vertigo to fear. Quickly stepping back, he swings his arm to defend himself and his hand tangles in the pull chain. A dusty bulb shrouded in cobwebs ignites, as if a clod of earth were glowing from the low ceiling.<\/p>\n He coughs from the musty odor of things sealed and undisturbed. From floor to ceiling, he is surrounded by shelves. On each shelf he sees old glass canning jars. Thousands of Ball jars crowded into rows and labeled, the hand-lettering faded beyond reading. A surviving \u201ce\u201d here, a \u201ccl\u201d there. He looks for pickles, peas, pears, parsnips. It\u2019s not what he finds. From the top shelf, he pulls down jars packed with cirrus, cumulus, nimbus, stratus clouds, all of them sealed tight. He sees all the faces and animals and the grotesqueries that ever came to him, lying on his back in fields staring up at the passing days: the flocks of sheep, herds of buffalo, legends of Roman soldiers, flotillas, armadas; the islands, archipelagos, continents where he wanted to spend his summers and falls; and the dancing Katchinas, the spirits that surely must be behind it all.<\/p>\n On the lower shelf are jars of wind. There\u2019s the one that softly dissolved him as he sat on the porch one long late afternoon. In the next, the wind that pushed waves into his boat as he crossed a lake, and the gust that caught his kite, breaking the twine, releasing him to blow across a field. The other jars are aswirl with what hasn\u2019t arrived.<\/p>\n There are jars of snowflakes, each classified according to its intricate frozen lattice. There are sunsets packed like colored sand in shot glasses sold in stores along the highway in Tucumcaria and Yuma. Jars of light rain and mists, deluges and floods. Forty days and forty nights of jars. Jars of extinct bird songs, jars of grackle crackle and sparrow twitter, so many he can\u2019t reach, sitting too far back.<\/p>\n He finds the shelf full of his breathing: the very first one that burned his lungs into life, the longest one when he fell from the oak breaking his arm, all of those from the hospital waiting for his father to die, all those inhaling the fragrance of another\u2019s hair, the new jars appearing at that moment to take in the breathing of this room.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Timberline Press, 59 pages, 2001 Out of print. Selections: IN HARMONY This is occupied country. Aliens have landed but no one\u2019s listening to the radio. Water towers are graffiti-stricken Martians invading on tip-toe. They spew forth hard water. We drink Continue reading Harmonic Balance<\/span>
\nAliens have landed
\nbut no one\u2019s listening to the radio.
\nWater towers are graffiti-stricken Martians
\ninvading on tip-toe.
\nThey spew forth hard water.
\nWe drink and are overwhelmed.
\nTime soaks our rusting bodies.<\/p>\n
\npassages of history.
\nIn low-angled evening light
\nthe storefronts are bright
\nas the Seven Cities of Cibola.
\nAfter school the Dog \u2018n Suds
\nis Normandy Beachhead,
\nthe landing vehicles
\nfilled with newly licensed
\nsixteen-year-olds.
\nMemory fails us recalling
\nonly the past.<\/p>\n
\nwants to speed up traffic.
\nGet rid of the bottlenecks.
\nThe streets are rerouted.
\nThe black arrows all point
\none way. No one comes back.<\/p>\n