When Samantha Left
for Samantha Smith
child peace envoy
1972-1985
When Samantha left the blind rains
were falling somewhere,
the unhearing falcon
tangent to hurricane’s eye and lost.
A girl and her father fell from the sky.
It was an important failure, another
of many come from that bad world
the radios and televisions speak of,
somewhat different because she was small
and had helped us hope a little
when we thought it counted.
But whatever was said as cameras
panned the crash site we knew
she had stopped like a countdown while we
were preparing suppers or going off shift.
A stranger stillness than perplexity had
taken her. It came as a fire not bred
of conflicts frozen in another age
but of flawed machinery or pilotage.
The experts knew.
Stillness survives the fires. It holds
the shoreline of consciousness
and we drive around it for as long
as it takes to be sure she and the others
have stopped caring so much,
that we will never again look up
from footprints trailing the car’s open door
wondering if we have heard them speak
or caught ourselves regarding her
in an anchored dinghy
lost in the dark that wells from her eyes.
Van Gogh’s Pipe
You could say it is dying, guttural glow scant
stain on the stoic blotches and unwinking lids.
It has laboured this day wafting between coughs
to augment aroma of oils and ink
in the misshapen chamber. Ashes
lie on the bandage where the bullet went in.
At the sound of startled crows the pipe’s flame
flutters a few beats in the dimness
above the bed. Dimensions of the room
converge in wake of those retreating cries,
frame a lone chair poised at the final wall
masking for all but the least mutilous ear
the flock’s rotation to fields still ripening,
one stark against that afamilial sky
backward flying in blue light among his fellows
wild with the imagined strength
of the heavens, his own interminable gaze.
What the Bullets Found
It seemed so rushed: close up, impound
the evidence, help mom and girls
recover; what the bullets found
was coroner’s work. Impending wounds,
exposed where fumbled sight and barrel
seemed poised to rush, could close, impound
the throb of the thirty-something girlfriend.
Siren and bullhorn off, they swirled
to recover what the bullets found
with bits of him described by friends
as a nice person who fell in with wolves.
News bites track to closure, impound
the story for succeeding rounds
of crisis, reporting this one world
recovered; not Brian’s world that found
its way past tracks he tooled around
with ex and son echoing tire squeals,
laughter, mud splattering with a pound
like bullets, like jounced toys from lost-and-found.
From the Hemlock, One
More Bough
The night he made his decision, no celestial
waves rose to ripple against the moon.
Its pale arms lay cold and folded in the fields,
and the barn owl chose no different route
by which to guide his limping shadow through
the dark of trees. He felt among the frozen
clods and boulders no sympathetic heart
to beat against his own, no roots groping
like veins beneath the soil for the unseeable mark
of the thunder. The complexion of the lake was calm
like a drowned face out in the weeds. The owl
completed its intricate circuit of trees. Among
hills
mists gathered like a brood aware the ripple
must come: subtle slap of a fin in the pool;
snap of a branch in the woods, no other branch moved by its fall.
David Parsley is an engineer/manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory where he works during the day (okay, and some nights and weekends)
on interplanetary probes and rovers. In addition to Lothlorien Poetry
Journal, his poems appear in London Grip, Poetry LA, Tiny Seed Literary
Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry, Poetry Panorama, and other journals and
anthologies.
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