L. Ward Abel

www.universecanoe.com

Athens

Summer
rain
on this college town
hilly terraced
pavement wet
threshold to threshold
all up for rent
the place
where
born the genre
famous and gone
if it weren't
for higher learning
a milltown would be
here
but rivulets
find big brother wide
later down on the coast
weather
nothing more than memory
changing
moving
leaving for home.

Bloomfield

On Christmas Eve
he'd come home
after eighteen hours' work
covered head to foot
in machine oil.
Old Broadway,
Macon,
yielded few jobs but these jobs
back in the Thirties:
the railroad
was among the last
to give up men to soup lines.
He left
such things as presents
and cheer
strewn,
because grind was all,
all was toil,
that was him.
The son, my father,
must have waited
patient
then distracted
for a returning,
distracted
for some unity
humor and pursuit,
but waited too long
with Grandmother,
another stranger
to holiday.

A Shed on Saturn's Moon

Did you hear
from her last night?
She in the far dark
outer rings,
she manifest
a core sample
with no call-waiting,
the line is busy
pulsing perpetual
over and over.

I heard her
in iron ore
that had been discarded
forced upward
convulsed
from the addiction,
stark contrast
to sun-patterns
on her limpness
cast.

Sins of mothers
borne in delay
someday manifest
her own girl-child
soon translates those secrets
and puzzles
beside the shore
of dusty waters,
the tide will be out.
Her black tarry housed.

Coltrane 1985

The tenor way
had fingers
and I didn't even know it.
No one had ever
exposed me
to that smooth blue stream,
that jazz.

When Skip played me
some Impulse labels
while living in Macon,
every measure, every space
was previously occupied,
every cubic foot and groove
crowded with ghosts.

The tenor way revealed
synapse,
never random but preordained---
a presbyterian artform
without boundaries,
without right angles,
like people---no right angles.

Somenights
from open fifth-or-eighth-floor-windows,
when heat wasn't a factor,
a New Jerusalem shone Kansas-City-like
swaying those reeds below
down along a fictitious Hudson River,
vibrating 'Trane's reed,
all from some manner of horn.
On nights like those I knew
of the way.

FYI, my chapbook, Peach Box and Verge, has been published by Little Poem Press (http://celaine.com/LittlePoemPress). My new book of poems, Jonesing For Byzantium, will be published later this year at UK Authors Press (Bristol, UK). Send us your comments on this article