Three Poems by Steve Klepetar

 

Even Then

 

On the day they met, my parents fell into a trance. 

Many years later, they stepped from the subway, 

walked to the park hand in hand. 

Near the entrance my father bought a bag 

of chestnuts, A little later he bought two custard cones. 

They sat on a bench and listened as young guys 

played the best version of Dock of the Bay they ever heard, 

guitars finding a strange and moving harmony. 

It was 1968 and they had tumbled from the past, 

through a gravity well or a cosmic cloud. 

Just a few minutes earlier they were in a beer garden 

where monks served a delicious brew. 

They were talking about opera, which they both loved, 

even though neither could carry a tune. 

When they sang together, all the dogs in Prague 

howled in agony. But now they were lying in the grass, 

sun and warm breeze, their new city rising around them 

like a forest of thorns it would take a hundred years to hack through, 

and even then, as they awoke, everyone they knew would have turned to dust.

 

 

Praise

You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.

Adam Jagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh 

My father rode the stars. 

Every night he dreamed a line of refugees, 

he held out loaves, and sometimes grasped a hand 

so empty that light could not escape. 

Every night he fell in love, riding on a train 

that slid into a steep ravine. 

He could hear the executioners singing 

as they marched to their lodge.

They sang in the shower, sang 

as they dried themselves, flicked towels 

at each other, laughing and shoving and loud. 

Every night he tried to praise the mutilated world, 

sometimes in German, sometimes in Czech. 

He praised the scent of baking bread 

in Latin, then in French.

He recited the names of flowers in English, 

but the petals clogged his throat 

and shallow roots sometimes tore from the soil. 

He called out to his brother, who wouldn’t respond. 

He called to his cousins, who answered with their hands.

Every night he tried to love the world, learned the names 

of every Senator, read for hours in his comfortable chair. 

Even when the heavy book sagged in his hands, even then, 

when cats argued and fought beneath the fire escape, 

he recalled faces that now were dust, and tried to praise the crippled world.

 

 

The Final Verse

 

Lonely and hardly awake, she stirs in the big bed.

All around are the hungry stars.

Their light has travelled for a thousand years, 

and now she holds a tin cup to her lips, 

gulps icy water as she watches the moon rise

over oak and pine. There in the shadows, her mother, 

a pale woman slipping between trees. 

Tonight her fingers tingle, she slips out of bed. 

Her window is wide open. Someone is singing 

an old song about a bird with a human face 

and her love,  a guilty man who wanders the sea. 

She is writing the scene, how cold water bit 

into her lips, how her mother’s shade hovered 

awhile with the owls, how the song seized her gut,

twisted her inside out as she struggled through the final verse.

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.