Cocktail Talk: Gaslight
Following up on our Ed Skoog-drinks-and-almost-pokes-his-eye-out (thanks for the worry, too, PhiSmi–it’s nice to know folks like you are looking out for the eyes of poets like Ed) post below, I decided to turn this into Ed Skoog week (a week being two posts here at the ol’ Spiked Punch). With that, here’s the first stanza in a poem Ed had in LitRag magazine, issue 5, in Winter 1999, almost 10 years ago. Jeezus. He doesn’t necessarily like the poem anymore (cause poets are like that), but hey, this is my blog, and I’ll do what I want. So there. And I do think this stanza is such a perfect dip into the personality/personalities of that moment when you’ve left the bar after being there a bit to walk out into the night. And I like bars, and poems, and you, which made me think you might like reading it, too. We’ll see (and, this gives me a chance to give a fat shout out from fat me to LitRag magazine, which I used to put out for the screaming masses with D-Rock back in the day, as the kids say).
We waver and our shadows waver
along the alley, walking home drunk
past blurred and dulled angles,
call it the parson’s late night amble
or the clock-gong’s pave of morning,
this moment on the broad plaza
between the Mississippi’s tankers
and Rome’s outpost in the old town,
the scent of old robes rising
as if they were bread loaves
which are baking somewhere, so are
the bars open still, intensely
compressing the night before
for a few more drops of that spell
that holds a body inside four walls
that do not form the corners of home.
–Ed Skoog, Gaslight, LitRag 5
