Poems

The storyteller dabbles in poetry.

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Total Solar

First published by Un Bodado De Voces, The Alternative New Year’s Re-deferred Spoken Word / Performance Extravaganza, 2022 Anthology.

on 21 august 2017
a half hour before noon
stanley idaho went sunless
we nor’easterners had swelled
the town from 68 to 1000s
we hiked by day

we gazed at night
counted the moons of jupiter
oohed and aahed the rings of saturn

our astronomer many weeks away
from his new hampshire home
gazed eastward; you miss

your family we said
his pupils moistened; his lips
trembled; i miss my dog he said

the day and moment arrive
lunacy obscures helios’s radiance
royal blue skies darken to navy blue

then to midnight blue; the air chills
birds roost; from behind moon’s
black orb flares sol’s corona

mercury emerges; venus and mars
regulus denebola and other stars
of constellation leo; ere long

light returns; the show flows east
but misses ole new hampshire
giving it nothing to howl at

The Key to the Crossing

First published by la arcada de los escribas, a summer solstice day spectacle of willfully poetic endeavors, 2023 Anthology.

Water sweeps beneath sheets of ice pushing
out air with the whoomp whoomp
of a bellowing whale.

Snowshoe tracks direct me to the crossing.
Stones fan out from either bank—but none reach
mid-stream, where a misstep becomes a last step.

As I linger, down the trail comes another trekker
who earlier told me this story: in an airport last year
he felt tired and woke five days later in a hospital.

A clogged artery and wasn’t it lucky (I say) you
were in an airport amongst EMTs and not on the trail.
Indeed (he says) out here I’d been a goner.

With no dithering, he descends the embankment,
treads rock to rock to the mid-stream chasm,
and (as I gasp) steps therein.

And steps out the other side! How did he do that?
Now I see it, a rock midstream, a bit submerged,
but good for a quick-step, the key to the crossing.

So, like him, I take the plunge. He leans on his poles
waiting for my safe traverse. Fortuitous for all
he had his heart attack not here but there.