Three Superb Poems by Steve Klepetar

 

Absence

 

I’m at rest, thinking of nothing.

Outside, dark as midnight, 

though it’s barely five o’clock.

This makes me sad, 

but in a quiet, pleasant way.

I enjoy the short days, 

with soup to keep us warm.

Absence makes me feel alive 

even as my heartbeat slows. 

I’m meditating on mortality, 

or maybe wandering 

in the shadow of tears. 

There’s bad news of course —

an injury requiring surgery.

I have calls to make, 

arrangements to secure, 

but for now I will let all that go.

I hear the furnace click on, 

then someone laughs

in an upstairs room.

Everything looks blurred, 

as if I had stood in the cold 

too long, looking up at the icy rain.

 

 

Another Page

 

I left before sunup, before coffee 

or the sound of many feet 

 

on the wooden steps. 

I left another page on your pillow. 

 

All night I thought about your eyes, 

how they might see the sky open 

 

like a cave mouth, how birds might fly 

through canyons of cloud and disappear. 

 

Once I saw a robin hopping 

on the grass, with snow in dirty piles

 

still melting all around.

She turned and stabbed at me 

 

with her glassy black eyes. 

I thought about her in the cold spring. 

 

You were gone then, working with equations 

on the other side of the world. 

 

I have written you another page, scratched 

and scarred with words. Hours passed 

 

as my hand moved. I touched your face,

as though the skin of your cheek 

 

could send messages through the wires of your life, 

and everything I wrote would burn in your wild beating heart.

 

 

Closure

 

“Closure doesn’t really exist, though.

That’s why we’re always searching for it.”

 

— Maggie Shipstead, “Great Circle”

 

It’s a door in the moon, a shadow 

that opens to the right touch. 

It’s a hollow place in the wall 

you find with fingertips, or maybe 

the last verse of an old song 

scratching its way home on vinyl 

as night comes on. You sang it once, 

long ago, with friends in a short-lived 

band, all those guitars and drums. 

You sang and the world 

came into focus as your voice 

poured out in a buttery wave. 

Next day you were on the bridge 

with your cousin, 

who drove to the next town 

just to feel the wind in her hair. 

You bought her a knife, 

but she lost it in the rain 

when it slipped from her hand.

By then the weather had turned 

and you were far away. 

There it is, the old moon 

with its passages and wires. 

If only you could find the way, 

if only you could dream a key. 

Today the mail came. 

There were postcards and bills, 

and a message written in code. 

Come to the spring, it said.

Drink deep until your memory returns.

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.