Gary Keenan - Big Day

Writing from the Colombian Andes, poet Gary Keenan’s poem “Big Day” is a chaotic cacophony collapsing into the soft rosy amber of stillness. We are whisked from the garish hot haze of city streets to dark quietude and a wistful peace, to the swelling warmth of memory. Gary explained to The Dewdrop that with his poem “Big Day”, readers are “witnessing imagination at work in the body’s sense of time and how everything is present in constant transformation from sensation to memory.” He continued, “Being in the present is the essential requirement of imagination as it demands action beyond self-containment into a release from the self. The form of this release is in constant change and only achieves its purpose in dynamic language that transcends self-expression, becoming an impersonal force equivalent to time, to light, to the kinetic energy of consciousness. Settings are incidental, variable, and only fixed in the moment the work occurs.”

Big Day

A city frail
By morning light,
The Flatiron hovering

In haze, Metropolitan Life
A glazed wedding cake:
No escape from the maze

Of brassy satanic blare
And pigeon shit dapples,
Designs for chaos

Cruel gods tucked into pages
Of the book of days;
Sycamore shadows bend

Over park benches, flaking green
Paint likened unto lichen
In a glance recalled later—

How little remains to be said
About oneself in the dark
Alone but how much

To do—we all dropped
Naked from night waters
Never to know such peace again,

Best leave it for next ones
To enjoy, and come up
With approximations,

Juice of peaches,
Long days at the beach,
A rare poem.

Gary Keenan

Gary Keenan lives in Tunia, Cauca, a village of 1800 in the Colombian Andes. His poems have appeared in journals in the US, Ireland, England, Denmark, Germany, India, and Australia since 1979. His book ROTARY DEVOTION won the 2016 Poets Out Loud Award and is available from Fordham University Press.