John Allman Verse-Virtual 2017 May

May 2017

I've been writing poems for more than 50 years. It never gets dull. That might explain why I dropped out of high school. It was too dull. Writing poetry is not.

MOON RISE

That it appears and sets like the sun.
Or Venus.  Or Mars. In Kabul.
Porto Novo.  Minsk.  La Paz.
At 1:31 a.m. a shift in the sky,
an unavoidable brightening.  Think
how you swerve to escape an
oncoming car, its high beams
flowing into your brain, something big-
eyed and famished.  That howl
in the neighborhood reported in
the afternoon papers with photos
of a shadow in moonlight crossing
the bridge over the lagoon, coming to
rest among red–blooming azaleas.
A childhood memory roaming there.
An odor of rising sea.  Something
lunar in a watery shine, a near shedding
of skin, coldness and the febrile
tossing of a child the first ripple
of scar the color of moon, though
we calm ourselves by looking up.
Luster, gloss, patina, the slide of
words, all objects listening, all the
night a single gleam.

First published in The Great River Review

MISTAKE AT THE DRY CLEANER’S

A 40-inch waist!  Suppose I pulled these chinos on,
fingered the frayed pocket where keys almost poked
through: the one to his SUV with Ohio plates,
the one with a blue tag labeled by the realtor,
the one to his elderly sister’s house, even though
she is visiting right now and he forgot to leave
her key in his pajama drawer back home, his own
extra house key there, wrapped in a rubber band
with an empty pill bottle, one refill to go.  This
is a capacious man who pushes the fries away from
his fish entrée, saving room for carrot cake and Irish
coffee.  His sister sleeps on the pull-out sofa in the
one-BR vacation rental unit.  Divorced, almost his
twin—the same crinkle around the eyes, an upward
curving mouth, left-handed, impatient with politics—
she makes the cole slaw.  She’s brought his favorite
Pinot Noir, which is the stain down on the edge of his
left cuff, her hand trembling and sloshing wine in a
glass a bit too full.  The outline of his stuffed wallet
shows through the left rear pocket, where a button
hangs by a thread (no attached card by the Dry Cleaner’s
saying they’ve replaced the button free of charge). You
can trace the bulge of his wallet’s life, almost see his
smudged social security card;  pages torn off a small
pad with cell phone numbers written down; his old
union membership ID; his wife’s last photo; the extra
key to the Honda she used to drive that he must put
up for sale once he returns home, before he sorts her
clothes and shoes, before he writes so many thanks
for all those flowers in Chapel C where she'd looked so
natural.

First published in Blackbird

MY 100TH YEAR

The front yard festooned with bittersweet vines
that choked out so many young maples that
I just wanted to spit.  But their orange
berries hang here to celebrate stubborn
life, leaky heart, the bad taste that birds know
to beak aside as so much counterfeit
nourishment.  Because birds do think.  And last
night’s woodchuck did take out the last of the
butternut squash thanks to the wire fence
I hung, that he dug under, shaking his
head why I never learn things belong to
each of us according to beak or tooth
or claw, maybe handed down, like acreage,
an office building, oil stocks and bearer
bonds, a priceless Rembrandt. What’s the
secret of long life? I think of the cigarette
Uncle Joe smoked forbidden on the porch,
Robert Mitchum’s wheezing emphysema,
the crackling lullaby of promises
like a mother’s kiss we wake to, the gap-
toothed old men in the Caucasus.  Look at
my granddaughters playing now with their own
daughters the age their mothers were when I
began this poem, the orange berries sway-
ing over their heads, the breath I try to
conserve in the wind coming off the sea.

First published in The Village Voice

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