Selected Poems

Foreign Neon Consider a landscape of winter, snow on the hill, ice along the roads a fire throwing heat into a room and blue smoke into a low-hung, damp afternoon air. But it remains summer here in the foothills and you've grown sleepy, tired of so many endless afternoons with only a book and glass of mediocre wine, what's local here. You've said well what you have to say and have given over what you have to give. You like to think there's something endless in what's still to be discovered. Consider distance, other locations, long flights to high-contrast cities lit-up at night in foreign neon. Will it be enough? She wakened you out of inventive dreaming, took a cool cloth to your head, brought to the room this glass of cool water? And what do you dream here Mr. Domestic, living the life as if this life were something rustic, more than just one time around? This isn't a dress rehearsal, your mother said, quoting, from one rustic source or another. You dream the habitable dreams, you dream the dream of co-habitation, one good woman, one address, a life worth repeating day by day. And the glass of cool water?-- it comes to room temperature and remains untouched, leaving a colorless ring on the wormwood nightstand, the woman's face in shadow, one hand on the white sheet, looking deeply into the inevitability of her fHalpern, Daniel is the author of 'Selected Poems' with ISBN 9780679429869 and ISBN 0679429867.