~ DELTA POETRY REVIEW ~

A Word that Means What Separates Us

from our Souls to Come

Though he was old, I wished another twenty years for him
to say his peace and blessings on the wrens, on how
the night descends to crowd in close and tuck us in.

It’s not enough to know the afterlife is coming next.
I want, right now, to know the knowing I’ll know then.
I want my wanting to be hollowed out and filled.

I’m reaching skyward on a night like this one
when wisteria has drenched the yard with scent
and a handbreadth separates me from my soul to come.

Must I always make sense, draw right angles,
keep track of the books on my study floor?
Following a feather, I’ll still arrive somewhere.

What if the gifts we bring were never meant to be
discovered by later epochs but, being lost, stand behind
our words as something faint we wish that we could say?

Poor Listener

With all I do to guard a moment, nonetheless
it heals itself. A leafless tree means more
light reaches crumbs the sparrows steal away.

Someone picking up a rifle finds it turned
into a mandolin or one of those childhood
willow limbs that fended off the wind.

I’m just repeating what wiser men have said, then
varying the emphasis of a word or two. Behind
this forcefulness, there’s mostly only beckoning.

Dickinson spoke reverie into my thoughts. I’m
now on errands from which I doubt I will return.
I have tasted the muscadine’s clutch at the sun.

Maybe all I have done—filling up notebooks
and wandering around—is talk to myself, poor
listener, but wherever I went, I never returned.

Jeff Hardin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Restoring the Narrative, Small Revolution, and No Other Kind of World, recipient of the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Southern Review, Hudson Review, Copper Nickel, The Laurel Review, Poetry Northwest, Ruminate, and others. His sixth collection, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, is forthcoming.

Visit his website: www.jeffhardin.weebly.com