Tag: Small

Four Poems by Meg Freer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

We Can Always Tell a Longer Story

Long-dead aloe and jade plants
remain on a window sill
like intricately carved sculptures,
more interesting than the dullness
of frosted window film upstairs.
The building’s immune system
doesn’t seem to be working well.

I have not seen the occupant
for weeks, have not smelled
the cannabis when I walk by,
although certain lights stay on
around the clock. Skipped town
for a while, perhaps, but no one
knows where to look or who to call.

I collect the tomatoes at least, before
the vines fall over from the weight.
An abundance of milkweed pods
and ‘kiss me over the garden gate’ flowers
dangle with green and magenta exuberance
over the barren driveway. Those plants thrive.
They don’t care if anyone lives there or not.

*

Watcher

Winter evenings, she watches
snow-covered rooftops, the factory’s white exterior,
and even the limestone walls of the historic church
turn lavender briefly at sunset.

Distorted nighttime sleep allows her to see
stranger things from her high apartment windows.
The man who stands on a bus stop bench,
rocks it back and forth while he entwines
willow branches into a large wreath for his head.

She keeps an eye on the tiny house that sold
but that no one moved into, watches for squatters.
Mostly she hopes for better sleep, or at least
that someday she will see something useful
like the man wanted for assaulting a woman
in the nearby park, or find out who does things like
pull up all the garlic in the community garden at night.

*

Tea Party

After the drama and mild trauma
of visiting the hospital’s locked ward
for the first time, entering the bare room
with neither table nor chair, where my friend
must subsist until her world stops turning on her,
I seek refuge with my neighbours,
my heart in need of a bath to wash away
all I saw and heard. We talk in their kitchen
with cups of ‘Irish tea’—whiskey,
in their house—because they say
I’m too pale. The ‘tea’ slows my heart rate,
and I gently close the door on that day
before it bangs shut.

*

Small, Weird Things
         in memoriam Bob M, poet

Breath combs the sides of my body,
clean lines of limbs between panes of glass.
Ginger and fig consort at the tip of my tongue.
I enter a secret room through the hole
in my pants pocket, discover bowls of silver coins.
Mountains lie down in submission at my feet.

Did I dream such things, or did you
send these images from the other side?
We wish you could see our celebration
of your life, then you enter the room
in the body of a squirrel—right on cue,
after a mention of “small, weird things,”
and we all cheer to know you made it.

Next morning at the bakery, a sign reads
Yesterday $3. Yes, I will take yesterday
for $3 if it means you will return again,
one more time. You always managed
to right yourself after falls of many kinds.
But even a squirrel will have one last fall.

*

Meg Freer teaches piano and writes poetry in Ontario. Her photos, short prose and poems have appeared in various North American anthologies and journals, and she has written two chapbooks of poems. She holds a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing with Distinction from Toronto’s Humber School of Writers.

Three Poems by James Crews

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Small, Good Things

Tonight, the fireflies blinking on
and off as light leaves the sky
are the synapses of my skin
firing as a breeze blows across me.
I sit on the porch steps doing nothing
for the few minutes I allow myself,
letting all the small, good things
from the day gather and hover
like mosquitoes landing with a
tremble among the hairs of my arms.

What if this is all we get of heaven,
little moments of joy sending out
their sharp scent like the basil plant
standing guard by the back door,
its leaves wanting nothing more
than to be torn, their essence released
to the night air. I can still make out
the jewel-like blooms of the purple
crown vetch crowding the flowerbed
around the stone, its vines once thought
to be invasive, though now we know
they nourish and restore even
the most depleted soil in the brief
time they come alive each summer.

*

How to Meet a Moment

To embrace a moment fully,
surrender your thoughts to the grass
between your toes, let droplets
of dew kiss your bare feet
with innocence, like children.

Walk the path to the apple tree
planted a hundred years ago,
now supporting the graft of a few
leafed-out branches that hold
the sunshine like a basket.

Hold sorrow too, let it rise in you
like yeasty sourdough left alone
in a warm place on the table,
and relish this necessary grief,
the bread of which also feeds you.

But once you’re finished feeling it,
be done. Find some other wondrous
thing to give your whole self to—
blue twine woven in a warbler’s nest,
the seedheads of rye grass waving
in wind, the blades suddenly parting
like the sea for you to enter.

*

The Call

We think of caterpillars as gladly
munching bitter leaves, marching
toward metamorphosis, and obeying
the silent inner command, which comes
when it’s time to spin the chrysalis,
slip on the wings of that new life.
Yet some decide to wait: they hear
the call to change and simply say no—
too afraid of the days of darkness,
the pain of a body turned inside-
out to become another. Next year,
they tell themselves, then inch on,
unable to imagine the freedom
of floating from one sweetness
to another, stopping on a stone
in the middle of a raging river
to drink and flex the wings they
once thought a figment of some
dream that would never come true.

*

James Crews is the editor of the best-selling anthology, How to Love the World, which has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, as well as in The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment, and his poems have been reprinted in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and The Christian Century. Crews teaches poetry at the University at Albany and lives with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont.