A Poetry as Perfect as a June Evening
Hostas shimmering in the shade,
bush bursting with pink peonies,
robins flittering raised bed
to raised bed, the garden wet
with recent rain, the catbird
swooping onto the arbor. And
some say all we are is flesh
and blood and bones and the dust
and ashes that we become,
a name on a stone, insubstantial
as the air these songbirds sing
their hungers through. I gift wrap
this present and present it to you
and thus we sit in the cool soft air
and not feel so alone. Here we are,
together, all that my heart suggests,
all this longing bundled up like
that rosebud ready to burst,
flowering out to you who I trust
will nod and smile and understand
everything. It takes a lifetime
to get at the meaning of one poem,
or person, the other side of the moon,
a mystery without which we would be no one,
a dark water beneath the inscrutable
surface, rich soil out of which
these white Madonna lilies blossom.
So let’s have a poetry that’s as perfect
as this late June evening, the sun burning
down the several layers of the sky
and a mourning dove measuring
its five-note elegy. This evening—
daring me to say something worthy,
something that offers a small response
to this moment in all its grandeur,
but all I can manage are
a few words of witness—woodpecker
owning the apple tree, hydrangeas
absorbing the sharp light. We can sit
all the way through the evening and not
not talk or read or even think,
we can hear the surrounding birds
and not assign names, or watch the slowly drifting
clouds without shaping them into
familiar figures. And the shadows across
the grass, no need to consider where
they begin or where they might end.
Simply to stroll out into the field
and leap onto a hay bale and observe,
from this rolled up bed of bound-up grass,
the epic of dusk turning into dark.
We strolled through it as it grew, quick
in the steady rain, and, when it finally dried,
listened as the farmer mowed and raked it
into windrows—breathing in
the sweetness, turning ourselves
into summer, understanding
the dog, why, when we unfasten
her leash, she tears full-tilt across
the field, nose tracing the soil’s
invisible scents, more alive than
we’ll ever be, inhabiting the moment,
so deeply inside her body she takes flight.
And we call her name, call her name,
all the way down to the pond,
the light show of the fireflies,
the trees barely holding on
to their barely visible shapes,
the contours of the water dissolving,
the frogs’ call and response
calming down all those daytime tensions,
croak after croak after croak.
And then the first star.
Philip Terman’s recent books include My Blossoming Everything, The Whole Mishpocha, and, as co-translator, Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected Poems of Riad Saleh Hussein. His recent work appears in The North American Review, One Art, and A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia. He directs The Bridge Literary Arts Center, a regional writer’s organization in western Pennsylvania, and is co- curator of the Jewish Poetry Reading Series, sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Buffalo. Terman conducts poetry workshops and coaches writing hither and yon.
Read more poetry by Philip Terman appearing in Terrain.org: “Bluebirds,” and “Dear America: To My Friend in Aleppo,” a Letter to America poem.
Header photo by Ingo Jakubke, courtesy Pixabay.
