Three Poems by Steve Klepetar

 

Notes Toward a New Apocalypse

 

Find the cave mouth, find the buried bones.

Come together slowly in the half light.

Tomorrow you will eat breakfast alone.

A dream hangs in the air, its edges melting like a clock.

All night you floated in a vermillion sky.

You bled, you coughed, you felt alone, unwanted in the dark.

It’s much colder now, with the windows open.

North wind drives a spray of leaves.

The time has come to open a new file.

You are content. The night was very dark, quiet 

and strangely green. You might have lived inside an egg.

Someone has smashed the TV. Broken glass on the basement floor.

In the kitchen, pancakes half eaten on the counter top.

You keep still. Panic races around the block, but you stay calm.

It seems to rain every day. Wet grass sticks to your shoes.

You slide down the sidewalk, lost in a city without gates.

A new line drawn in the sand. On one side, the dead, 

on the other, a pair of crows to help you make your choice.

In the far north

 

we wait in darkness for a new birth.

We nibble cheesecake bars and cinnamon. 

We stare out at fallen leaves, listen to the wind.

Sometimes the walls close in. 

We shrink into ourselves. 

It can be days in the far north with nothing, 

empty hours without shape or sound.

Then something moves in the shadows, 

something almost silent, but earthborn and hard. 

We wait in darkness, as we have been trained. 

We wait for the faint sound of footfalls, 

the rhythm of breath and teeth.

In the far north we are sometimes afraid, 

sometimes worried when the world contracts 

to a single point, the shrunken moon in a frozen pond.

The Poem That Stayed Awake All Night

It may have been that nap, ill advised, 

or too much coffee in the afternoon. 

It may have been the waking dream — 

a man asleep on a slanted roof high above 

a canyon where three mules trod a weary path. 

Suddenly rain, and the man woke, his face 

and hair soaked, shuddering in the cold. 

A small voice said “Grandpa, you need 

mousse for your hair.” With stiff fingers 

he combed through his thinning locks.

“Looks fine now,” he said. 

“No, it looks terrible,” said the tiny girl,

and he stared through rain 

as the poem listened to wind singing

of bread and bombs and a stream 

of wishes spilling like beans on a tabletop.

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.