3 poems
CHIME
It lulls me from my back-porch beam
Shimmers like the gamelan I once heard
Wavering in, beyond the edge
Of an Ubud literary gig,
Lily pads forfeiting center stage,
Vulvas, stamens, spread like the fingers
Of an open hand, petals strewn
Along the walks, colored fragments
Of the wind, anonymous, without
Consciousness, shaped by thought,
Carrying some old Indonesian tune
Across the ocean in an old gym bag
Till I nailed it to my beam
Where chance makes music of its strings,
This human place, pitching
Pentatonic at the edge of space
GIVE US THIS DAY/FIN
Happiness a loaf of bread, the oven not yet cold,
Knowledge the quarter spoon of grain
That leavens dough. All history
That first spread taste, all sustenance that host,
Sips from the tip of the tongue
Then in a final hint of salt, all aspiration comes.
***
When I scissored open her mailed ring,
The f hole of a silent vibrato
Carved a red calligraphy—
Only the word fin dangling from a string.
SOLO
Now it seems your life has been
Nights on late-night dialup, solo in
A communist block city
The television spouting a language
You could never quite fathom
Despite your years of tutelage.
You gather yourself into weekends
With books you’ve read twice.
So strange to sit at home in Paradise!
But once you sent a cab
To the right Chongqing gate.
Queen Sea Big Shark! Saturday night.
You slipped your key into the wrong
Lock in Dresden, wandered around
Looking for a wi-fi connection
Then slept in Nis, rented a four
On the floor jalopy at Constantine
The Great. Then 300 miles south
Where each pristine beach
Was the life you could never keep.
So you ordered another in Macedonia,
Cabbed it in Ubud to the local clinic
Patched your sorry gut gone belly up.
You barely caught the flight, Sita
And Rama on strings, hitching a ride
In your one zipped bag. (You threw away
Your clothes to carry them). In NY Customs
They poked for drugs and parasites.
The wood came clean. Sure enough
You were a gamelan, a puppet man.
But mostly it has been for you
Home seasoning where you tithed
Your yearly dues, did what the locals do,
Soccer, track meets, Sunday school.
Leaned heavily on a mother
Married to a farmer. She taught solos
To your son, your daughter. You traveled
When your children were grown.
Everywhere you went, you went alone....
Stephen Haven’s fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was a finalist for Eyewear Publishing’s International Beverly Prize for Literature. The Flight from Meaning will appear from Eyewear Publishing in 2021. Haven is also the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America (New American Press), winner of the New American Poetry Prize. On the basis of his second poetry collection, Dust and Bread (Turning Point), he received the 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year award. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, The Southern Review, Salmagundi, Image, North American Review, Guernica, The European Journal of International Law, World Literature, Asheville Poetry Review, Chautauqua and Blackbird, among other journals. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Lesley University, in Cambridge, MA, where he teaches in the Humanities Division and in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.