January 2024
Van Hartmann
van.hartmann@gmail.com
Bio Note: I recently retired from over forty years of teaching English at Manhattanville College. I live in Norwalk, CT, with my wife, Laurel Peterson, and our aging but still frisbee addicted Labrador Retriever, Calder. In addition to poetry, I find joy in kayaking in the Sound, playing tennis with long-time friends, and sharing theater, art museums, and the occasional martini with Laurel. My third book of poems, Afloat, was recently released with a number of poems that were fortunate to have first found their place on the Verse-Virtual site.

Josephine
I sit with my dog listening to Josephine Baker’s voice dancing out from my speakers. I’m trying to read a book about cosmic background radiation, and the origin of spacetime, thinking someday I might just get string theory and black holes, but now wanting to peel a banana just to see how the skin falls, then drop a scoop of ice cream on it, coat it with chocolate syrup, plop a cherry on top, red and round and ripe as her voice. Instead, I slip the dog a treat, pour myself a shot of bourbon, make believe I’m sipping Count Basie, Miles, or Coltrane, or some sadly wailing clarinet somewhere on the left bank of this expanding universe, trying not to cry over spilled time, while the dog turns his radioscopic ears toward Josephine singing from multiverses far away.

Planting Potatoes
In the spring, my father cut potatoes into flesh-white wedges, each with a scarf of russet skin from which one white puckered eye protruded, buried them half a foot deep, raked a shroud of black earth over their grave, pressed it firm with dirt-caked hands, then walked away toward fall. In the fall, after raking multi-colored leaves into a funeral pyre, setting the offering ablaze, he sank a pronged spade into the cold ground, leaned his weight into the handle, levered heavy russet treasures from the moist earth, my father now Merlin raising fully fleshed dirt-covered bodies from the dead. This spring I’ve cut and planted potato wedges in a canvas bag outside the garden fence, chanting incantations, hoping the deer, rabbits, gophers don’t discover what spells are cast, what magic is at work deep inside the dark brown earth.

Still Water
Even a thimbleful of water breeds mosquitos, so I emptied the bird bath to keep the pests from plaguing my wife when she sat reading on the patio I’d covered in crushed rock to subdue the ivy and the weeds, creating a lulling space in the late shade when the sun falls behind the house. My wife refilled the bird bath, bringing back, at first, a robin who eyed her cautiously before diving into the water, then caught her eye again to share some private communion. After him, sparrows and a jay, tossing sunlit spray, then at dusk a doe and her fawn sipped quietly from the basin, turned tawny faces toward us, flicked white tails in celebration.
©2024 Van Hartmann
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