Rad Geek People's Daily

This was from a while back on the Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the Day podcast. I made a note at the time but didn’t post it. To-day I’m looking over the note, and I know so much the desolation of the airport delay. But as far as the place and the weather goes, now it all feels like a dispatch from some alien land, in an ancient age far beyond the ken of the fathers of the fathers of men.

April Snow

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world
is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep
their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred
waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle
when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows
the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.
I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various
faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t
want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep
I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces
of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.
I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

— Matthew Zapruder, April Snow
From Come on All You Ghosts (2010)
and Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the Day podcast (1 April 2023)