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Edward Nudelman

Summer of 1969
(for John Lennon)

That rock upon my shoulder is a fly,
A moving rock, a sedentary soldier,
A prod, a weight, a listless evening thought.

The mind is a bottle.
The hand an instrument-
The heart will always be a shield.

All night the cicadas hammered on their dulcimers.
All night the heavy air confined its space
As if the time had come for pronouncement.

But nothing to move doldrums of summer sleep
Or mornings crouched as low as grass,
The endless moments after mowing.

Nothing sweet and nothing sour-
But something clearly on my shoulder,
A sedentary soldier.

Edward Nudelman is a native of Seattle and a graduate of the University of Washington, now living in the Boston area. Some of his poems have recently appeared in Atlanta Review MiPOesias Magazine, Plainsongs, Tears in the Fence, Penwood Review, Best of Café Café, Ocho (MiPOesias) and FourW. When he is not channeling Frost he can be found in a laboratory extracting cancer cells (he has 60 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals).   His poems investigate the apparent ambiguities and paradoxes in human experience as well as metaphysical ideas and impulses.