Joseph Somoza

To Anselm Hollo

The garbage truck

pulls up, and I wonder

should I have

mentioned it?

I wonder also

at the clouds

that earlier dropped

a shower

on this back yard

and sent me

running with books

inside

just when I was

eager

to sit outside and

write about

returning home—

how like a fresh

shower

it feels

to be back

in the familiar world

of things

and cats.

***

Manna

Nothing could be simpler

than the locust tree’s shadow

projected on the back lawn

in the morning,

the faint chirpings of finches,

your slippered feet up

on a lawn chair

in front of you,

the nearby houses empty

of people who left earlier

for work.

For the time being, no one

has a claim on anything

that might please you.

Even your calculating mind

is at rest, your wife

in her studio, your mother

in her own world miles away,

your children, brothers, and friends

assumed to be happy

somewhere.

The cuckoo clock chimes

ten times, and

nothing changes.  The sky

remains blue.

The doves wait on their branches

for seed from the bird feeder

to fall.

***

The Next Poem

Put the old poems away.  They’re

finished.  You’ve revised them

out of existence.  Only the next

poem matters, the words

that have begun appearing

on lines in your notebook

as you sit under the mulberry,

occasionally looking

at a red finch at the feeder.

A freight train howls by.  It must be that

time of morning.

And now the howling has diminished

as the train reaches the outskirts,

the outer skirts, as if town

were an old gypsy woman wearing

multiple layers.  An aberrant image

has just entered the poem,

like that dove flying by, disrupting

the poem’s unity and direction that

something in you insists on

maintaining, maybe your training in

literature at college

from the days you so wanted to

switch majors to English to be

in class with the pretty girls—

the Judy Denmans who walk in late

to class, blouse and long hair

dripping from a rainstorm.  

“Hello, thrasher.”  “Hello, sparrow.”  

The light green locust leaves this April

clash particularly with the blue during this

calm before spring winds start up.  

A thrasher pecks the sand as if he were

a sandpiper at the beach

though there are no sand crabs here

in the desert.

But there is, now, a surplus of

activity as a spring wind

begins, and you wonder how to end this

flow of words that starts up often

in the mornings,

until your coffee hunger outweighs your

curiosity to see how many lines

the words will fill before the poem’s

energy runs out—

like a baseball game gone into

extra innings, which, theoretically,

could go on forever.

***

***