ABSTRACT Link: YOU’LL LIKE TACOMA: A SEQUENCE OF FIVE POEMS by Patrick E. Ballard

1.

No clarity here

Or if there is, it only emerges from the ocean—

Land/sky/sea

Sun gone to pale blue in the clouds, sitting east.

2.

thunderheads/clouds beneath the clouds—

always the stern rush inland—

there is a binary here, nothing fresh about it and always/

a struggle to get beyond the wet and the dry—

 you want to say/to tell/everyone that this is a dead end.

the land is flood-prone/and there is always a river (slow) or a lake (black).

so the reconciliation of landscape with personal history is difficult/

one is heavier than the other/and there is rain saturating all of it.

I can only speak of the I-5 corridor/and not even the whole of that—

 the largest of the illusions implied here is synthesis. 

3.

I suppose I should mention the freeways/

the long bray and roar of them/

the city has been vivisected/

had a new artery forced into the wound/

and so the child knows signage/

the child knows signage/

the movement of goods/

and the wet mark of location/

Helvetica a glare under the streetlamps/

When the child sees the freeway/

he tries to get a handle on the severance/

tries to process the bifurcation but cannot/

squat factories/warehouses

(fence  access road  loading dock)

they glimmer in the rain/become...

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