November 16th, 2009
Bob Brooks
HURRICANE BOB
Even hours after Hurricane Bob—
the Wrath of Bob—
made its pitiful midnight landfall
thirty or so miles down the coast from us,
I couldn’t sleep. I was still gauging
each new instant’s dangers.
I could feel the waves snatch at the seawall
that the front of the cabin was perched on.
The wind was still turned up way too loud.
The back side, I’d heard, was supposed to be
worse than the front side. Had it come through yet?
Was it still coming?
Next morning I’d write in my notebook
about how my wife got up and made the coffee wrong
and reset the electric clock wrong,
strolled on the torn-up beach for a bit
and settled down to read a thousand-page novel
by Jean Auel, and how irritated I was with her,
how I fumed; how much I’d unlearned.
I’d been sober eight months.
A drunk, I would write, no matter how good
or how bad he feels, knows exactly why.
It’s a knowledge he’s always safe in.
But at three in the morning,
between one side and the other of the hurricane,
while my wife beside me hummed through slumber I
ticked like eleven alarm clocks.
–from Rattle #23, Spring 2005
You misquoted this in the tweet. Not fair to the poet. Have to leave dots to show something left out. Feel strongly about this. How old Cary Grant?
I disagree — there’s a difference between dropping a verb and dropping an aside that doesn’t change the sentence, and wouldn’t make sense out of context anyway. In a formal setting, of course I’d include the ellipse, but we’re talking about Twitter, and I’m just trying to make people interested in reading the guy’s poem.
I refuse to see Twitter as the end of poetry. I got fooled into that state of mind by Marshall McLuhan forty years ago, and here we still are–some of us–thinking that every word matters. A quotation is a quotation, even on Twitter.