Five Poems by Ken Holland

 

 

An Old Wives’ Tale

 

 

I’ve heard it said that hearsay 

isn’t admissible in trying to justify one’s life. 

 

But my mother always said she’d heard otherwise, 

and cited one or two old wives’ tales to that very point. 

 

She was, in her way, simply trying to bequeath me 

the certainty of truth. But truth has no certainty. 

 

And now we’re told all matter, dark or otherwise, 

is composed of nano-sized strings of vibrating energy. 

 

Which we’re also told is a theory, 

and therefore still refutable. 

 

Though at season’s first frost, I’ve been known to stand 

in my backyard naked but for the essentials 

 

and feel myself trembling as if I’d proven some proof— 

a moment strung with its own certitude 

 

even as the rest of my life lay 

in the misty realm of the theoretical, 

 

a tapestry of memory frayed down to the fragments 

of the merely possible. 

 

Which is a rather chilling way to look at one’s life. 

And may very well explain all the shivering we do. 

 

How we live life as if sometimes unproven; 

but then, at other times, as if perfectly true.

 

 

 

A Little Dustup

 

 

I once had an idea no larger 

than a mote 

 

but it was at a time when I didn’t want 

to touch the world 

 

even though the leaves clicked their crisp language 

 

and winter opened its first chronicle of light 

 

stars like percussive bits of shrapnel 

shredding the night sky. 

 

While in my house, the rising heat played 

with the dust, set it shambling across the room 

 

a cotillion of particles dancing to a mute tune 

 

and among the shyest the heat had set afloat 

 

an idea I once had, no larger than a mote.

 

 

 

The Dancing Possibilities

 

Some believe that somewhere out there, 

far from near, light years from here, 

out there among the two hundred billion stars 

of this, our galaxy; among the two hundred 

billion galaxies of this, our universe; 

each of these galaxies with their 

two hundred billion, six hundred billion, 

their trillion stars; that yes, yes, out there 

assuredly this or that life form, this or that 

intelligence, malevolence, beneficence, or 

something of single-celled consistence 

must exist. 

 

And of all this I’ve sometimes sat and wondered, 

and as often wondered how in all of this, in the 

multiplicities of dancing possibilities, in the likelihood 

of probabilities, that I somehow feel no wonder at all. 

 

 

This Will Only Take a Moment

 

 

What if…what if I wrote a poem 

not of this moment, nor of a moment 

past, nor future. 

 

What if I wrote a poem where a person, 

yet unborn, would not need to pause 

to ask herself, What is this thing 

called ‘coal’? 

 

Yet unborn, pausing to ask, What is this quality 

he calls ‘unmerciful’? 

 

Or if from an age past, to wonder at the phrase 

mutually assured destruction. Or, trend lines. 

As in, trend lines trending toward 

oceanic rising; which, if you consider, 

is the same as mutually assured destruction. 

 

Or the word mass, how a medieval priest 

would think of the church liturgy, while 

the yet-to-be-born might think of the weight 

contained in the nucleus of an atom. 

 

And therefore how curious they each might find it— 

the word mass followed by the word shooting. 

 

And what is a priest to do with the illuminated manuscript 

That is the screen of a handheld device? 

 

And what is our futurist to do with the quaint memory 

Of when once we had hands? Hands that held other hands. 

 

So again, what if I wrote a poem 

Not of any given moment, but of a moment 

Without moment? What words 

Would I then use? What if there is no given moment 

To give words to? A gift to give, forever ungiven?

 

 

 

Bon Mot

 

 

At speed that approaches that of light, 

time, whatever it is, nearly stops. 

 

The simple batting of an eyelash 

that will take ten thousand years to reach you. 

 

And though long gone, the love that arrives 

arrives coquettishly new.

 

Ken Holland has had work widely published in such journals as Rattle, Tulane Review, Southwest Review, and Tar River Poetry. He was awarded first place in the 2022 New Ohio Review poetry contest, judged by Kim Addonizio, and was a finalist in the 2022 Lascaux Prize in Poetry. His book length manuscript, Summer of the Gods, was a semi-finalist in the 2022 Able Muse book competition as well as Word Work’s 2022 Washington Prize. He’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and lives in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. More by visiting his website: www.kenhollandpoet.com