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Famous Reporter 19

Currajah

 

FAMES FINNEGAN

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black and white

 

Digits of french fries, x-ray of a hand

shown through a crumpled paper sack,

soaked in a puddle after rain. White rose

petals caught in a spiderweb by the back stair.

Some would pass without a glance, a thing

you would stop to stare at, study for several minutes,

a half-hour, as long as it took to understand.

To make out the Chinese characters for kingdom,

waterfall and moon in the skidmarks below the overpass.

Code of the clay tiles missing from a neighbor's roof.

The teeth's calibrations around an ear of corn.

To take notice of this, these. It is not a sign,

nor ancient augury: a doll's head used for a gas cap.

Objects in stasis, through silence, that speak-

that mean, if only by simple existence.

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James Finnegan lives in W. Hartford, Connecticut. He works as underwriter in the field of banking insurance. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, The Southern Review and many other literary journals.