Two Poems by Gary Fincke

The Exact Likeness for Grief

Swinging a pitching wedge, my father lofts
Seven golf balls over my mother’s grave.
To spare the grass, he hits from the shoulder,
Picking them clean from the thin lie of dirt.

It’s forty yards, I’m guessing, to the woods
Where all but one of seven disappear
In yardage he can manage, length to spare,
At eighty-eight, his knees beyond repair.

He limps to her grave site, his love an arc
That ends among trees. The flowers he’s picked
Follow him in my hands; he turns the club
Upside down and uses it as a cane.

“Some day you’ll know,” my father says, meaning
His knees, and then again, “Some day you’ll know,”
Meaning, this time, the grave, this selection
Of flowers, orange ones I cannot name.

My father, the prophet, bends to the vase
Of wilted stems. My father, who’s warned me,
“You’ll see” a thousand times, lifts the fresh buds
From my hands, steadies himself on my arm.

My father, who was a maintenance man,
Sends the old stems to the woods in my hands,
Seats the flowers by height like a teacher
While I kick the short ball into the trees.

*

Peace, a Flightless Bird

Algorithms are sending me ads
for cremation services, ones that
save money through pre-need purchase.

The world gives daily birth to flags;
They shriek their certainties
In foster homes they will grow to burn.

All myths have become biographies.
Every war is undeclared.
Even our secrets are undeserved.

Peace, a flightless bird, is extinct, war
So ordinary we show up for work
Like soldiers, our anger expected.

In the museum of memory
We inspect the webbed footprints
Sunk so far into the earth

We nearly remember the shape
Of a bird so large it must have
Believed there was nothing it need fear.

*

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have been published by Arkansas, Ohio State, Michigan State, Lynx House, BkMk, and Jacar. His newest collection For Now, We Have Been Spared will be published by Slant Books late this year.