gary lundy

you press the rewind button

watch the same scene over until loss regulates a breach into which we all might run. an accord found between two close friends. or the movement of others whose bodies sway in the moving waves of sound and traffic. ignore for a few minutes those things beyond loss. how to now return to those boxes assumed forever lost to landfill. or a closet or drawer of a stranger. bookcase or wall. all lost although finally not. when they remember to call and we aren’t home. particles upon particles. of the one now fallen to dust. our floor covered. fragments crack underfoot. the accumulation of wasted details. we might still find room to love they say. all the while you nod fighting off sleep.

gary lundy

when i close my eyes i fall into disquieted memory

flood within frames of imagined past events no more real than the color blue. regard a quiet as if contemplation an everyday recurring event. where a newly discovered photograph compels analogy. you sketch out your days forgetful wander under unexamined happiness. when food runs low and wine sours. when they unexpectedly slap us our glasses fall break. the residual trace of others. cigarette butts tossed onto the ground. crumpled coffee and soda cups. plastics and cardboards surround and grow in clumps. so that one wearing miniskirt and handlebar mustache attracts our attention. out of a rising boredom in the everyday. looks prevail whenever ears focus on conversation or song. when there’s nothing to say napping comes too easily. they wonder why you ignore them. or if rather they take up all your attention and thus compel you to shut them out. not even at night when quiet attaches to the rooms are they able to amend the pain that constantly compromises any even slight activity. whenever it just doesn’t work.

gary lundy

are there locators for those days when indispensable vacates.

when hours fly north with the geese. hard to notice you’ve been voiceless for two months three days. not that dates count for much other than broken promises. where contracts constrict our movement and leave us in state of compromise nonplussed. or rather while the water boils check up on their movement across rugged terrain. when they startle and spill coffee or sprouts stick to the cover over skin pleasure. those usual moments when everything doesn’t hold together. they wander alongside others delusional. wrap the morning plans in warm weather protection. otherwise they garner praise and smile wrapped in red. slow it to a tune on the radio. resolve not to subject themselves to errancy when in pursuit of unwanted attention.

gary lundy and I have known each other forever almost, or at least decades, which is almost forever. We met at a philosophy and poetry conference in Canada and have been inseparable since, mostly online. Through those decades, we have continued to converse  poetically and philosophically through the personal.

His first book, When Voices Detach Themselves (Is a Rose Press), delves deep into personal space and comes out with cultural revelations. His most recent book, Heartbreak Elopes into a Kind of Forgiving (Is a Rose Press), dives even further, if possible, into the heart of matters, uncovering the space for forgiveness and a desire for continued connection—even from deep within introspection. We feel the power of pausing in order to understand how the outer world shapes us, especially through the ideas of relation/ship and loss.

The three poems above play on memory, nostalgia, and longing—the delusions of what we take as granted and the cracks and splatters of a glass of wine shattering on the ground of that false sense of knowing. Looking at it from my own contexts of distortion, gary’s work seems to play in a liminal space, on the boundary of what we understand but can’t articulate clearly in our limited, culturally-shaped language, with imagery that we understand without language, in that boundary where delusions fracture to reveal glimpses of our human longing for connection, and tones of desire form the pallette of his word paintings.

gary lundy’s poetry books can be found at Independent book sellers through Indiebound.

Digital art and photo of trees ©2016 Michael Dickel
Photo of gary lundy from his book Heartbreak Elopes into a Kind of Forgiving @2016