“The Region,” “Shapes Of The Word,” and “Wedding”

“The Region,” “Shapes Of The Word,” and “Wedding”

Image
Image by John Hamel

The Region

To drive past Coop City late on Saturday night

Is to see what the human worm can weave –

The coral towers stand out their lights against

The pitch-night Sound, our Venetian spires

On mudflats of the Connecticut coast,

The myriad lives within and lighted rooms,

The bearing up and soldiering on, the silent need

And leaving homes,

And heavy streaming roar of traffic passing years,

The many lives within like myriad calls

Of birds first light

Who voice the mate, the build and share,

The broken shells and fallen young –

How like and yet most unlike indeed.

Shapes of the Word

Sun-shaped, dressed in a moo-moo

Yellow and ungainly bright,

She appeared at my door to ask a simple question,

To which I made a gruff reply, being choked

With papers to be graded.

Nudged by thought or heart, I looked up,

When she had gone

And saw only the air of her departure,

The bountiful fault line in time

Remained as I ran where I sat, still hadn’t fled

Some momentary after-image of her,

Frictionless, generative,

The air within air on the move, silent sparks

Along the jam.

Between worlds a pinole of light

Gave what’s there and gone

In the doorway’s frame, a flashing fish,

The lightning face on the shroud’s vanish,

Asking no more

Than to break bread in kind words,

And still she left me this.

Wedding

In the courtyard the lyre and the flute resound.

Young men dance and women stand aside and watch.

Among the guests, configuring the whole, one man

Stands up from the bottom of the grave his assembled dust:

Funnel meeting funnel, rim to rim, expanding

In either direction, the thought of his heart, the empty

Fills.  Clapping vibrates from the mouths

Of cut-stone jars and day-coals burn.

 

People of the town, do you smell the travelling flame

Expand its canopy?  You who saw the torch-lit crowd

Pass at dawn, when the buildings flashed with light

And song, do you hear the music coming down like the eyes

Of the translating man who rises from the river.

 

                                                          Are you

                            But the memory of sunshine

                       In winter when love no longer lives?

Where are you when we need you, whose book declares

                     That there will be a spring, but now, right now,

                                                     Come around,

                                                     Fill the jars,

                   When smoke of stove-fire fills the air.

 

                    Sunshine’s gone when he disappears,

Who gives us what we need, casts a light

                              And lights around the dark

                           That still means the world for us;

                                                        Come around,

                                                        Fill the jars,

                         When smoke of wildfire fills the air

                          And songs of long ago the wedding dance.

About the Author

John Hamel

I am a school teacher and live in Oregon. I have published several poems and translations of poems in the past (Arion, Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review, American Journal of Poetry).