PARALLEL

I must be interconnected
with oxygenated organs
of generations extending

through nature’s grammar
nature’s gramophone
I’m on that mountain

I call it my escape
& while I stood out in a near
translucent halo-like light

this muggy afternoon
I thought of the year 1985
when the brown wasp

flew dizzyingly by the rose
like a choreographed
interlude as if drunk on

the flower’s enticing aroma
as if blushing the same color
in a Mediterranean air

moments like this make me
freeze in awe yet prepared
to hit the bricks just in case

but MAD I tell you! MAD
with some kind of ecstasy!
what Chesterton would call

the natural elements of nature
as Supernatural Before
that wasp stung the air

with imposing presence
flying past that rose
I had watched the local news

on television report
a brutal crime in Cobb County
With all of those details

fresh in-mind watermelon-fresh
I stood in a still-warm shade
frozen like the wooly mammoth

that Russian scientists
recently found recovering blood
that ran out of the frozen carcass

& I felt an immensity
of sustainable beauty
that no effervescent element

could slant the shifting atoms
of this moment that
impregnates plump-full

my mind my paralleled
reflection of century after century
uplifted energized harmonized

& indeed I thought of 1985
The year that Pete Rose passed
Ty Cobb for most hits all-time