Holaday Mason
i am personally incapable of rendering anything funny unless it lyrically IS! just like this beautiful life-- irony as Sarah Maclay says -- "Is The New Black". ________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Nothing
“Nothing …whips your head around like a convertible”
Lilly Dale, 12/31/2000
Heaven is sighing, write a poem about nothing.
No images, metaphors, simile or grace.
No fingerprints of leaf shadows
From the goddamned trees.
No conversions, catharsis, subversions, laments.
No answer to questions of “why” or “what.” No
Marionettes, amulets, glissades or
Antebellum houses. I will not incorporate
The words cockhorse or dreidel
Suggesting to the reader they
Have something to do with each other.
Nothing about the queer quality
Of the wind whipping down
The granite sheer as if exhausted, simply
Exhausted from the high pressure; maybe
Even needing a stiff drink.
None on the last moments of a plane flight gone bad.
No babies, Chinese nightingale, omens, Shelley
or Keats. No seaweed. Not a word of the ocean
Even if it owns my heart.
Oh yes, no more depending on the heart for help
Or Athena for that matter.
Reflections about my grandmother, my
Mother, the missing father, breasts, drugs,
Philosophy? Out. Absolutely no fucking (buy the book).
So too, dreamy slow dancing with a lover’s
White gloved hand at the nape of your neck
In a huge cool room with a breeze.
Definitely skip the bit about the clock
Being like a ship’s wheel even if it is.
I don’t have to miss anyone or tell anything,
Not in another poem for months.
Won’t service my taste buds for the peculiar,
Or ponder the elegance of
No divided by Yes, or Yes, divided by No
As matters of choice.
Nothing about love or existential matters at all.
Fine art, jazz, silk underwear, all gone.
Not even a peep about the pleasures of sleep.
Nothing is what I have to say.
And it’s a fine, fine thing. Nothing is a billboard
Made of sapphire sequins reflecting a sky
That disappears one night
Leaving in its wake, nothing.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Holaday Mason is the author of Towards the Forest (07 The University of Minnesota-- New River Press) & two chapbooks Light Spilling From Its Own Cup (Inevitable Press,1999) and Interlude (Far Star Fire Press, 2001). Her manuscript Dissolve was a finalist for the 2005 Autumn House Press prize, The Backwater Press & The Tupelo Press awards. A Pushcart nominee, publications include Poetry International, American Literary Review, The Laurel Review, Pool, Smartish Pace, Runes, Solo, and The River Styx. She lives in Venice California & sometimes serves as artist in residence for Beyond Baroque for whom she co -edited the anthology Echo 681.