Author Archives: Jeff Schwaner

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About Jeff Schwaner

Poet: three published books of verse and two novels. Studied poetry at Cornell University, where I was awarded the Dorothy Sugarman Poetry Prize and George Harmon Coxe Award for Contributions to Creative Writing. Entrepreneur: Co-founder in 2000 of Booksurge, an author-initiated self publishing and Print On Demand (POD) site purchased by Amazon in 2005. Working guy: manager at LexisNexis. Family man: husband and father of three. New England native and current Virginia resident. Big fan of Blue Ridge mountains and hills and trees in general.

A poem by my son

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Note: the family is sitting around trying to write verse inspired by music for a contest (“The Writer’s Ear”) sponsored by the local schools. Here is what my six year old son August came up with. It should be further noted that this verse is illuminated in magic marker and that the poem’s narrator is a fire-breathing monster of some kind. But regardless of that, I think the last couplet is a keeper for all of us.
 

I’m tearing down a building
my friend is a skunk

I need a little friend
when I’m in a big fight

Lament for a Black Dog

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Lament for a Black Dog

 

Here’s grief again–summoned by absence
it comes and even when absence flies it stays
taking the shape of the tree nothing is perched on
later this shape appears everywhere

without warning in full form as if it had been there
growing for years and years and we only
now just saw it—how did it grow so big
rooted so deeply in the middle of the road?

Years Ago, At This Very Spot

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Years Ago, At This Very Spot

 

I sit at the bottom of a shallow sea.
Above the surface, the old mountains are all wavy,
leaning down. They are stooped and as patient
as the deserts of wizened lizards they will become.
The new one, the one I will drive over to work
the one on which I will see the maple’s early change
the one on which I will see the brown bear’s lazy gaze
the one on which I will stand  with my aging father
has still not taken its first tectonic steps.
It’s not even the apple in extruding lava’s eye,
yet by the time I am old enough
to put on these eyeglasses
it will already be ten-times diminished
from its highest peak.  I miss this part as

A big thing blocks out the yellow white sun above me
and swallows an ancestor or two.
When it is gone only the Star River shows the flow.

Happiness

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Happiness

 

I know these  petals unless pressed
in your own life’s book will not survive
and even then as a shadow of love’s shape
or unless adrift in your river’s endless flow
come to outline any eddy worth circling
and even then could gutter off a bank or
regret’s cold stone where air
tears at life’s evaporating edge
or unless emblazoned with wing
of robes softly opening to heat and
even then burn only as a blindfolded
assurance of need, need:
or unless left alone a becoming
drifts around it, swirls it down just so
like snow a mile up lands finely
at the foot of the sky

Small Song for Time Passing

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Small Song for Time Passing

 

Even below freezing, the slight snow
melts under sun to show hard ground

But behind the tree trunk’s bulk it stays
whitish, slow-blurring across the day’s drift

The Maple

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The Maple

 

Near the top of the mountain
Across the grief of February’s empty arms
A single maple bursts into red buds.

*

The tree is not predicting spring, I note
And though alone, as I am, driving past,
Is not a symbol of courage, or a prophet, as I think I’d like.

It’s a being of air and earth, maybe keener
Than its cohorts at sensing a change in soil
Or air enabling itself to change

Into its next self.  In the morning
I hear the birds it cannot hear that tell me things
Are on their way to April.  I have my own cues

To draw from me the things I grow.
But that can’t be all: the Anglo-Saxon maple harp,
Excavated from a barrow in Berkshire,

Still struck an open chord
Across the dirt of centuries.
The maple love spoons carved by Welsh

Ancestors hang on the thrift store wall
And can still be recognized for what they are:
A domestic object wrought with

A passion undomestic and ornate. The maple
Is  durable for carving and can hold personal feelings
Far longer than the body can. Long after grief

Has run its course and the forces of air and earth
Have consumed us back into the world of unerring matter
And our family trees severed from this single point

Of meeting. Maybe that’s why this maple means
What it means to me, alone and driving by.

 

from the collection The Artificial Horizon

Outside In

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Outside In

 

The garden is in the recluse, not the other way around.
You rivers and mountains pale against the heights and gorges

She must climb. I am the hand in her mind where thought gets tough.
I am the step suddenly appearing. In the calm harvest fields I know

I have often been missing, off on the mountain’s other side.
But in the slow running river my boat is not far away,

she’ll call a breeze to fetch me faster than words paddle. Here in her
garden, I’ll meet the better me, nodding as I pass on my way to her.

Diminishing Returns

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Diminishing Returns

 

I crack the window, listen:
What message can this cold wind carry

but this breeze won’t tilt my room’s way and come in
I reach out it slips through my fingers

Unkind even to the moon it has taken a little off the top
Diminished month sent howling through the pines

Unauthored, not meant to be read –
or merely hurrying by, a forgotten promise?