Secret Vespers

It is raining and as usual you are standing in it, waiting. I don’t know why. It is a temperate rain. A body can easily warm what water soaks through. You are dressed for it much better than I am.

I want to give you something. A mint canister has been discarded. I pick it up and scrub it with the rain and my finger. I push its dents back out. I do the best I can, but you can still see where it was dented. It opens and closes well, but it needs something inside. I pick up a curl of hopeful red plastic and drop it in. I give it to you open.

You brush a wet lock off your cheek. The drops are heavy now. I don’t mind closing my eyes for a moment.

Next time I see you, I offer you a chain of paperclips. When it is sunny I gather twigs and wrap them in twine. But usually it rains. I am sure you are standing in it today, but before I find you, I go to look for pennies on the sidewalk. The shiniest was minted in nineteen eighty five. I promise you it will reflect a disk of light onto your palm once the rain clears away.

As Timothy Green puts it, “Poetry is everywhere… It happens by accident all the time.”

The idea behind his Found Poetry Project is to see what happens when you look for those accidents. Maybe a note on your power bill sounds like a haiku, or a message your drunk friend left sounds like free association. See what happens when you write them out like poems!

I found something and emailed it in. It’s called Public Retraction, and the original source should still come up if you google it.

I’ll leave you with a couple of links:

• http://www.foundpoetry.org/blog/2009/03/public-retraction/ to the poem I found and formatted.
• http://www.foundpoetry.org/blog/rules/ to the rules for the Found Poetry Project.

I enjoyed doing this. It didn’t take effort or inspiration or angst. It made me notice how odd and beautiful and seductive the ordinary language around me is, things I might never have thought about twice. The project is up and running, and absolutely anyone is allowed to try. I’d love to hear about the poems you find. If you like, then leave them as comments or leave links to them.

I have found the notes you hide. The first—not of your notes but of the ones I found—was stuffed in the window of a city bus. I saw it was a page from a larger work, numbered 27 and beginning in the middle of a conversation. I liked that message. Don’t we all meet in the middle of a conversation?

I know the work is at least 391 pages long. Judging by page 391 it is much, much longer. I know it has a preface, I have page xiv. I know it is divided into chapters, I can see their titles: Thunderstorm, Tokyo at Night, Broken Chair, and others that appear to be the names of characters. I do not have any consecutive pages. One name has come up twice, but so common it could mean two people. The writing is divergent, a different voice to every page, topics that leap from paragraph to paragraph: the ink of an octopus, a brother and sister racing cars, the stairwell of a downtown mall, the conversation a young woman overhears. I do not know if the pages are meant to be read consecutively or in the order that I am finding them.

Maybe I am imagining this, in fact I must be, in fact it fails more often than it succeeds, but tell me, do you work hints into each page, are they a treasure hunt? Page 72 described a pavilion in a park. I spent an afternoon searching parks and found page 219 in the second one I searched. But then, I was so sure Sunken Ship meant the naval memorial, and though I worked my fingernails into every crack of the thing, the warden thought I was crazy and there was nothing there.

No, I must be imagining it. I can’t be the only one finding these pages. I can’t be the only one they are meant for. I wonder how many people are gathering up these broken pieces of you. I wonder if we have more in common with each other than we do with you.