Category Archives: Poetry

First Frost

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First Frost

The half moon rides high in the ninth hour of morning.
The leaves on the ground are raising their hands
As if they all have the answer
To a question I am not ready to ask.

Through this small city most of the river is submerged
But I see it just past the fire station emerge like the ground
Hog nobody was waiting on and sniff the grass and its first
Frost. Then it dives back under a chunk of rock and
The express hotel beyond. Standing on that same grass,
Listening to its reminders, I almost reach down
To touch the silvered signature, but don’t. I know it will
Not be the last frost I see. But if it were
Would I want the thaw of the first and last
Of anything on my hands? Nor will
This memory melt, nor river run over.

Thanksgiving [for P.H. Liotta]

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Thanksgiving

Suddenly awake, writing in the dark, an hour
Before dawn this Thanksgiving.
The air outside as brittle as the century-old window
Above my bed. Out there light has receded into the stars
Like a dream catapulted away by waking
To a place you will never reach again
Though you were there, so far away,
Just moments ago, and were sure you awoke
Yourself to write down something about it
As quickly as possible, which is why you are
Writing in the dark, suddenly wide awake
And with a mind as blank as a black window.

Outside, stars have settled in the empty branches
Across the street. Pausing on their migration
To someplace warmer. A handful of others glow
On the ground, and I could be led to believe
They are really the brightly burning spirits
Of this world instead of street lights.

Up high, at the top of the window
The brightest, most distant ones sit.
Long dead, probably. Living in the moment’s
At its most relative when the moment’s brightest
Nick in the blackness is millions of years extinguished.
Living in the moment, I understand, can be
Living in the light of a source long gone,
In the words of a life ended in fire.
It is more than not forgetting; This light from the past,
your voice, these words—I will take it, I will demand it.

Graveyard_PHLNOTE: It was about this time last year that I found out that an old friend of mine from college, Peter Liotta, had died in a car accident a year earlier. I knew Peter way back over two decades ago, when I was a senior at Cornell and he was an older grad student–already married and in his mid- or late-twenties–in the MFA program. I had printed a pamphlet of one of Peter’s poems, and we kept in touch for a few years as I went into bookselling and he published the wonderful Learning to Fly, as well as a book of poems and a novel. Picking up those books, and a newer title called The Graveyard of Fallen Monuments from 2007, I could discern Peter’s distinctive old-soul voice as clear as a bell. For awhile that voice remained with me in a particularly strong way, and I awoke in the dark of a Thanksgiving morning thinking on these things, and the result was this poem. //JSS

Night Walk on Cape Cod, 8 of 8

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NightWalk8of8The last of the 8-haiku series, printed letterpress by St Brigid Press as a limited edition drink coaster set. Available on the Books page here or at St Brigid Press.