All poems copyright, Steve Klepetar 2004.
To A Friend Who Doesn’t Like Poetry
He attends my reading, a little awkward, a bit
uncomfortable, even diffident in suit coat among
the jeans and tie-dyed shirts. Afterwards, fingering
cheap merlot in a plastic cup, he says “that was goo –
uh, I enjoy – uh –you did a real good – well it was
interesti – I really don’t like poetry.”
I’m nodding, straining to hear him over conversations
buzzing through the room, wondering how to answer
in just the right tone, neither sarcastic nor obsequious,
but I don’t need to speak, he has plenty to say.
“Frankly, I’ve never understood the point of poetry,
why you can’t just say what you have to say, simple
and straightforward?” and I think “ok, but how could
you say ‘Cottleston, cottleston, cottleston pie, a fly
can’t bird but a bird can fly’ without poetry?”
and I know before I can bring words to my lips
that he would answer “who’d ever want to say that?”
“But what about ‘Night’s candles are burnt out
and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops?’
How could you say that in prose” and he’d respond
“All that says is it’s morning” and I’d want to say
“but that bit about night’s candles not only gets
at the stars in a way that’s both metaphor and image,
but also how the lovers’ time is measured, because
there is only so much candle wax and wick, and while
day may be jocund, standing tiptoe, straining over
the mountain tops, the lovers are anything but – their
night is over, they must part, Romeo in exile
to Mantua, but I know that’s just talk and if I were
any good at that, I sure as hell wouldn’t need to write poems.
April Fool
Sun sails powder blue spring sky,
boat of millions of years. Up close
your red face glares. You ask me if
I think I know the truth, if I presume
omniscience, you demand to know
who the hell I think I am. Your
breath hot in my face, your glasses
steamed, your voice oily and ugly
and hard. Once I was a reptile, coiled
ready to strike at ankle or fist shoved
too close to the rock where I sunned
myself. Too ready to bite, I broke a
fang or two. But I’ve evolved at least
to mammal state and I’m resolved (this
just may be your lucky day) to let you live.
Breathing Steam
For hours breathing steam with herbs
she opens like a cave before wind.
She casts spells. Hair on her neck rises,
skin tingles as though some hidden finger
traces interlaced designs, invisible tattoos.
She aligns herself with night and smoke.
In a vision, owls speak to her of sap rising
in the pines, and of the mysteries of mice
and grubs. Someone strikes a gong, and
sound ripples green against her ears.
Three times her fists close on empty air.
Comfort Food
This has nothing to do with taste.
From the kitchen, songs in the key
of olive oil, oratorio
for spatula and pan.
Everyone here wears aprons
and silly white hats, crumpled
at the top like marshmallows.
Hands move with speed and grace.
All this you feel in glands above your throat.
Last night I dreamed I stole a wad
of bills from your purse, your vacation
role, sweated I’d get caught, though you
would never suspect
me.
What did that look mean?
Every word a trap and all this brightly
colored cash! What would I do
then, my reputation ruined, your trust gone?
I woke starved for something hot and sweet,
a treat that would take a good
deal of effort to prepare. I hoped
for strawberries, eggs, golden batter
on a griddle, bubbling, maybe with savory
thick bacon sizzling to add salt
and smoke.
Dream theft it seems, makes hungry
work, and disembodied guilt a piquant sauce.
Happy Hour
Once, when I stopped out
with a friend for a beer, I found myself
not for the first time
sadly lacking.
He opened a case of wonders
at our table, rainbows tumbling
and spinning, aligning
themselves in colorful concentric
arcs, and sweet sounds haunting
as whale songs on the ocean’s wide stretch.
Amid the usual bar
sounds (glasses
clinking, happy
hour voices, a shrill
laugh
or two) his mantic songs,
his brilliant lunacy.
He had small machines
that danced in rhythms complex
as a thousand undercurrents, rivers
and wind and even the heartbeat of a crow.
The Dead Stand Before Green Osiris
The dead stand before green Osiris
waiting to be judged. How did they
handle it so easily, that assembly line
of death? To make it individual,
each soul led by the hand, Isis and
Nephthys, gentle in elegant dresses,
wearing the moon on their crowns.
Every single heart gets weighed
against a feather sitting on perfectly
balanced scales. Anubis looks on,
composite beast denied again,
and again. Ibis-headed Toth writes
it all down. Today the Nile floods
again. Green life germinates from
black ooze. Judgment without hell
or pain or bodies writhing. Death
without flames, only a boat winding
out of the harbor like an arrow
speeding to the heart of a deer,
a hawk tracing sun’s golden path
across the vast blue desert sky.
I Met The Beast
Four hundred yards into the forest
and I met the beast, yellow fur
and teeth clacking like castanets,
eyes burning red and black, face
a swirling vortex, a snarl made flesh.
I met him at the Spot Café downtown
eating ribs slathered in barbecue
sauce, washed down with diet pop.
He was pissed off about something,
wiped his wide mouth on his sleeve.
I met him in my bedroom hunched
on the floor counting marbles, greedy
boy, all fists and dirty nails and hair
sticky with sweets. I meet him all
the time now, on TV or at the movies
screaming obscenities at the screen
or at a meeting, in his dark blue suit,
red power tie, tapping like some huge
woodpecker on his PDA. He tells me
he believes in God, that we should
support our troops, that someone has
to pay. At ballgames his whistle shatters
the pain threshold, he drinks plastic cups
of beer, wears a jersey, paints his face.
All night he howls curses to some private moon.
The Twenty-First Century
I’m digging a pit in my front yard, but I keep hitting
rocks. My spade crunches against the small ones,
unpleasant, friction-heavy sound but the large ones
go clunk! And I have to stop to pull them out, knees
bent like my father taught me, back straight, lifting
with my legs. The pile grows and grows as I dig
deeper. Soon I’ll have built a solid cairn beside my
pit, with a small, symbolic doorway for spirits to crawl
through, if only there were any spirits here.
My neighbor sidles over with his radio and two cold
cans of beer. He admires my hole but seems confused
about what he calls “that damned pile of rocks” so I
explain how people in ancient times raised a pyramid
of rough stones for a memorial of some event, or to
mark the grave of a prominent member of the tribe
or as a boundary or landmark on a sacred mountain top
or holy spring. We sip our beers, white clouds spatter
across the afternoon sky. War news on the radio, naked
prisoners, wedding party blown to hell. “Yeah,” he says,
rubbing hands on the knees of his jeans, leaning to spit
in the hole, “twenty-first century’s sure going well so far.”
In God’s Burning Rain
A friend once told me about writing a song,
“Standing in God’s Burning Rain,”
started singing right in the street:
“standing, standing, I’m standing in God’s
burning rain!”
That’s all I remember, but since 1973
I can’t get that out of my head, this young
guy wailing about God’s burning
rain as we walked back toward Regenstein Library
after he beat the crap out of me at racquetball
for about the fiftieth time.
I’m pissed off about losing, pissed that he’s bellowing
his own song,
but it gets in my head, thinking
about the image of rain and fire and wrath
and how he half closed
his eyes, sang right out there with people
stopping to stare, leaves burning
red and orange in trees around the quad.
Wind whipping from the east, you could smell dead
alewives off Lake Michigan,
students lined up buying polish sausage
from a truck on 57th and America
full of people, and Vietnam
and the Middle East
and in Chicago
south of the Mall always on fire, flames
you couldn’t necessarily
see, slowly burning, all standing in God’s burning rain.
My Father Rises
My father rises slowly through soft earth
by the fence where we buried him nearly
ten years ago. Pale and thin, white hair
plastered with mud, he makes his way
into the kitchen through the screen porch,
careful to leave his soiled shoes outside.
By the time I offer him coffee, made just
how he likes it, strong with an extra scoop
for the pot, he is clean in white shirt, jacket
buttoned, ready to go to the bank or
downtown to work. “Why are you here?”
I ask and he answers “I have come to see
the plants.” We walk back outside
through spring oaks and dew soaked, emerald-
thick grass. He stops twice to look around,
breathe deep. “Garden smells so good!”
he says. At the neighbor’s fence we bend
to look at clusters of mum stems bursting
from the ground, green flames of iris leaves,
tall lilac bushes just budding purple and white
above the damp hole gaping at their complex roots.