~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Jeff Hardin

An Afterlife

Where I once lived, grown men

leapt from bridges and lived to tell

and claimed a story of seeing

ghosts and haints along a ridge,

shadows that meant no harm

but merely gave to thought

the body's old predicament.

And hay fields held the dew

on up into day, yet no one

stopped to think about the beauty,

for what would be the point?

The road from where one was

to where one needed yesterday to be

went past a barn that leaned,

and no one called it weary or forlorn,

though everyone I knew was weary

or forlorn, or forlorn with weariness

a barn might be the place to sit inside

and rest from a while. One barn's loft was

always open; and once—among the people

I called home—I said aloud, "It needs

a little shut eye," and got the strangest

looks. In time, of course, I went away

and sometimes feel as though

I'm living in an afterlife where

tree limbs tamp down all disputes

and fence posts point toward

where our souls can go, where

always I've been going, a trail

I'm often lost on, unsure of

where to turn or how to say it,

and then I hear a whip-poor-will

and leaves stirred up inside a dance,

and that's how now I sing it out,

and that's how now I glide along.

Brought Low

If I thought my voice might matter,

I'd scatter it among the chickens.

They ran ahead of me the years

I visited Papaw's farm and tried

to see what world would come—

broken, of course, and worn away

but maybe, if imagined right,

full of proclamations, things to know

that few, if any, ever come to know.

My peace is this, is thus: I've lived

to see that I have lived. I've been

brought low, stripped of who I am

and shown the freedom of my absence

added to the days that follow afterwards.

The leaves that yellow the maple

illumine more than what the eye

can see; for often—I'll just say it—

we look out from the souls we are

and not from selves; and the soul,

despite its faltering of late, is drawn

to light, its many rooms. The soul

is spoken to and is silent; it waits

for what's revealed, our only world,

a place where any moment now

a limb may shift or sway,

a shadow slide along the grass,

and something unknown ever

will faintly be and then not be—

and isn't that a joyful noise,

and is there any other, truly,

and isn't having been at all

a thought that seems beyond

the mind, beyond the words

we hold and offer up, o words

that fall to where our going goes.

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in Image, The Bennington Review, Laurel Review, Zone 3, Grist, Literary Matters, and others. He lives and teaches in TN.