Category Archives: Poetry

February still life

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February still life

Rain. Which coastal town was I dreaming
last night we’d moved to where the rain

comes with a bookmark of the ocean
and the snow apologizes when it alights on dunes

with the sound of regret? The color of change
on change. Wrapping my head around how one

impermanence devours another
is like leaning on a dune fence:

its weakness is what makes it impossible
To climb or cross. Its effect is staying

In place in a place where no lines hold.
The horizon balances no books. Flat pasts

slide away, pages of undertow. Words too
late to change the page fall as I’m reading it. Rain.

End of January

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End of January

No invitations left for it.
I am all outside now

Beyond any framework for this god of doors
Its first face is four years long

I am tired of looking through its road-salt eyes
The month’s mouth is a boy’s knee

Punctured by a splayed root
Its voice is a wrist shattered like ice

Its ears a bird caught in a basement
On the coldest night of the year

Its other face is a choice
Nobody saw coming

Longer days

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Longer days

The winter rain is unhappy drifting against the window
It cannot come in it is too light to knock or ask

Beyond a whisper in the puddles which the mud steals
As its own only long enough for the steps to take it up

So we know whether the steps are coming here
Or to a there in a different direction going away in the silent rain

The snow though voiceless collects its silence upward
To visibility the shape of a voice without argument

This is the source of the grudge the steps carry away
This is why we are frightened as the steps come

From nowhere on a quiet morning when nothing
Should be arriving but the day a few minutes earlier

But here they come after the quiet winter rain
In the minutes surprised at how new the world is

seconds still falling like rain too soft
to cry out after slipping on a dream

Of ice on the heel of waking on these longer days

12312018

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The days fall off the wall calendar
Like ice cubes from a tray.

Time applies the slightest pressure
And we’ll never know if it had more

Strength than that because it’s never
Necessary, the liquid days slow and

churn opaque and then click away.
When I was alone I used to spend the year’s

Last minutes on the roof, by the basketball
Pole in the driveway I’d shimmy up,

Grateful for family in the house below but
Not needing them to be grateful for everything else.

There was always enough space between
The stars for gratitude, no matter how cold.

Now, with my own family, I can hear time
Pacing back and forth on the roof, impatient.

I think about that garage roof in Rhode Island
Every year, but I no longer need to see stars.

Brok3n [by August Schwaner, age 11]

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Note: My son August, age 11, wrote this poem this morning. 

Brok3n

The wind blows
It does nothing
The rain falls
It does nothing
Yet if you were the rain
Or the wind
You would cry out
“Remember me too.”
And if you were yourself
You would already be doing that
Oddly, I’m ready.
I don’t know what for.
But I know if the wind and the rain stops
I’ll cry out
“Somebody Break Me”
And the stars will reply
“Not yet.”

Wallace Stevens walks abroad on a foggy-mild first night of December, passing as an unseen shadow by my window from which I often view the public library, and has nothing further to do with this poem

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Wallace Stevens walks abroad on a foggy-mild first night of December, passing as an unseen shadow by my window from which I often view the public library, and has nothing further to do with this poem

That one had a little skull to speak of.

Magnolia trees’ fail to announce themselves but demand to be seen. As if once they were simple flowers for the dead, rootless like a funeral flower left by a stone, but time turned it into a tree with the unexpected smoothness and texture and the character of a stone, and the smell of lemons reminded us of all whom we miss and who miss us but are by us forgotten. A shadow reminded me of this

While I walked with a scary god in the dark.

It’s not debt I fear but desertion. That there’s no scary god beside me that I pick up and carry when things get difficult.

I pulled off last month’s skin and saw that I am already that memory you have of me, it said to me under a streetlight. I said something like a thought has to be light or it can’t fly and we left it at that.

The baby’s skull mends itself from the moment it’s born, like it knows what’s coming. The magnolia’s petals, like softened plates of bone abandoned by a weak seam.

I knew if I said anything like “seem” that you’d think I was writing about Stevens. And now he’s part of this poem for you, even as the poem is coming together like the plates of a skull to keep Wallace Stevens out of its mind.

This is what I knew about the South. I drove across an empty parking lot in the Florence of South Carolina. Inside the coliseum, the hockey players swarmed in a pre-game drill.

By the time I turned around my scary god was trying to bury me among the abandoned boats of fallen magnolia leaves. His eye sockets were the shells of boiled peanuts and his mouth was a stately house left by its family as the burning army came closer.

November hymnal (30)

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November hymnal (30)

I have cast these songs as a spell
Against the clarity of faith and doubt

Drafted the lyrics on fog
Or as water freezing on a windshield

Light still coming on through
Not broken but improbable

Temporary refractions where
Nothing’s lost to trust

I have cast these songs as a counterweight
To wings who’d take me from creek wisdom

And these songs I’ve cast like rocks
Through the windows of sunday

Thirty days leave like clouds
over cold jetty stones

November hymnal (29)

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November hymnal (29)

The wind blows the massacre over mountains
And the mountains blunted by a billion years

Still shudder and a twist of vultures descends
Through the leftover chasm of last breaths

As if it would corkscrew through the hotel parking lot
The crust of asphalt crumbling like a cork

Down the red earth to the buried creek
But they settle on a pine and resume waiting

For something new to die. Hundreds of pine needles
Drift down like hairs uncounted by God.

November hymnal (28) / A Memorable Fancy (for Wm. Blake and A.R. Ammons)

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November hymnal (28) / A Memorable Fancy (for Wm. Blake and A.R. Ammons)

As I was walking with the rain along the gutter
Nudging sodden leaves over to clear a way

Or arranging wind-sticks parallel to the stream
To frame water’s efficiency, I heard a thump and saw

November’s angel crouching on the curb.
I ignored him, flicking an oak leaf on its back

To watch it skry the secrets of the surface picking
Up speed but kept him in the corner of my eye

Like you do a wasp off the end of summer’s porch.
His wings were sewn of fallen black walnut twigs

His eyes empty walnut husks his oily tears black
His muddy shield a yard sign for the side that lost

Election, limbs swelling of green willow torn tender by a storm
And twined useless for winter burning. Look I said without looking

Myself at him how the fallen is transfigured into
This slender stream of mourning how every failed

Flight gives it sinew and speed. The angel had a word
But could not with a tongue of apple core spit it out

And I did not want a word with him: still I figured he meant
Well enough though a few of his feet washed away

In the strengthening rain river and I kept to the far side
Of the runoff thinking even God could not cross live water

Without a boat or an invitation or swim lessons at the Y
First: turkey vultures of which there are many in this valley

Won’t eat a living thing and my faith shambling beside me
One wing cocked like a wound’s stitches on the sky still

Had at least a threat or curse left in him but the Black
Vulture will pick at what’s weak and having seen if it puts

Up a fight or bares its belly dig in before the blessing:
The water was a streetside torrent the width of a car tire

And there came a flapping I felt more than heard
And twigs like tiny logs coursed by me in the stream

And the month clicked its beak and pieces of black
Husk I watched slide downstream toward December.