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.

Solstice

We hold hands, approach the broken ash 

where last summer we sprinkled wine

to celebrate the nearly endless light.

Where have the white owls gone? 

That night a pair careened above our heads,

circling toward the tree line and the pond.

Now it’s wind and full moon. Prophets tell us 

empire is ending, but there is plenty of heat 

in this slow decline. Say goodnight, my love. 

Fire blazes in the rock ring, first golden, 

then red, as shadows slide along the grass,

toward broken houses with windows gaping wide.

Giant Squid

I love how your hair falls like a shower of light.

All afternoon I look at you, secretly 

through the pages of my book. 

Your sad face still seems fiercely alive

even though everything is horrible now. 

Our neighbours are moving to a city far away.

We promise to text, visit some day.

My granddaughter’s class 

is doing a unit on the sea, giant squids,

which she tells me are mysterious as gods.

I could be a giant squid deep near the ocean floor. 

I would not be a mystery to myself and all my squid wives.

We’d know nothing about billions of stars in the Milky Way.

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.