Three Astounding Poems by Steve Klepetar

 

Idaho

 

I must have been thinking of the night we walked 

to the bar as snow fell through streetlights.

 

The door opened to a warm fug of smoke and beer. 

I was too tired to drink, so I ate some pretzels,

 

watched the game on TV while you talked 

to the bartender and the guys on the stools. 

 

I hadn’t eaten for a while. My clothes were stiff. 

The radio was playing a country song about a girl 

 

who had taken off for Idaho.

When I was six, I could sing like an angel, 

 

and I never shut up. When my voice changed, 

the choir director told me to mouth the words, 

 

and one day I showed up for rehearsal, 

and they had moved away to another school.

 

I went out for tennis, joined the photography club, 

but I didn’t have a camera or a racket, so they tossed me 

 

in the pool, and I came in second in the backstroke. 

I always loved how the lunchroom tilted toward the sea.

 

 

Let’s Spend the Night Together

 

Cold night with snow blowing around the streetlight, 

the road obscured and dark. 

Why were we out on a night like this? 

If I remember right, we walked through the park, 

came out near a statue of the Virgin 

at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs. 

We watched her for a while, 

marble white in the glow of a beam, 

snow streaming around her upraised hands. 

So quiet without the usual traffic noise. 

By then we were hungry, stopped for a slice 

at Rosalia’s, Rolling Stones on the jukebox, 

“Let’s Spend the Night Together.” 

We sang along, drumming with our fingers on the table, 

and when we got up to go, a man spat out “Fucking hippies!” 

He sat in a booth alone. Turned out he was a neighbor, 

one of the guys your father always beat at chess. 

You smiled at him and waved. 

“Teddy?” he said. “You go around like this?” 

On the sidewalk a tired cop, ear flaps down on his fur hat, 

and two girls slipping, laughing in the cold, 

breath rising like blessed souls above their shining hair.

 

 

Was that you?

 

Caught on the hook of a dream, I toss until light 

wrenches me awake. Where was I sailing, on what flat-bottomed boat? 

 

Was that you, with bird’s wings and a feathery crown, 

singing such rich notes as waves rolled me far from shore? 

 

Here in the north, wind blows fierce. It tears down tree limbs, litters the yard 

with shingles. Even crows struggle against strength that bends pines to the wet grass. 

 

But the mountains are wrapped in fog so deep they cannot be seen, 

only felt as a presence beyond the aspen trees. 

 

I waited for you where the river bent and twisted south. 

I waited in the dark, hoping you would come with light in your palms. 

 

We were empty as our cups, 

anxious to be filled again with wine. 

 

Soon we were walking hand in hand, a little tipsy, a little cold. 

It was drizzling then, your hair flaked with shining drops of rain.

 

Steve Klepetar lives in the Shire (Berkshire County, in Massachusetts, that is). His work has appeared widely and has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. He is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Family Reunion and The Li Bo Poems.

Steve Klepetar is waiting out the winter and the pandemic in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.