Greg Kosmicki
SATURDAY MORNING 6-22-2013
I should be out mowing the lawn.
It’s way overgrown, I haven’t mown
in three weeks, and we’ve got company coming by
for the 4th of July. I am sitting in the recliner
with my feet up, wearing a pair of flip flops
with a pair of socks. Every time I do that
my grown-up children and my wife rail at me
that it’s so unfashionable to wear socks
with flip flops, but no one ever said anything
to Ah-Young, our Korean exchange student
all those years ago. The sun is bright outside,
the clouds having cleared away after an early squall.
I can hear the cars go by in the street making
that car-goes-by-in-the-street sound
that I decided finally a couple years ago
to include in my subconscious inventory as a sound
of nature, along with the wind soughing through the trees,
waves crashing onto shores or merely lapping,
the sound of rain as it falls on anything natural
or made by people, the movement of feet
across a surface, or the robin exclaiming
in the tree in my yard that he is there and has
something to sing about. He may be shooing
the other males away, he may be calling
to the females of his species, he may be singing
because that is what he can’t stop himself from doing.
—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
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Greg Kosmicki: “I like to write about what’s happening around me. It’s weird because when I write most of my poems I think that they are really shit because nothing ever really happens very often in day-to-day life, and I can’t figure out why I bothered to write them. Then, when I come back to them a few weeks or months later, there they are, and I feel like I’ve stumbled upon some artifact in an old cave, of a day and a time that are no more, and I am happy that I was able to capture that. Plus, I have found them to be invaluable tools in the never-ending struggle old people have about who was right about when something happened and who was there and what was said—so in a sense, my poems are like a rear-guard action by a retreating army, or maybe climbing ropes played out to keep what was once the present, or sometimes the future we made it to, anchored in the past.”
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