Wednesday, 10 September 2025

Four Untitled Poems by Joel Chace

 






               One filched wish  --  could be anybody’s 

               They all check their hope boxes. 

               He runs away from school.  He’s

               tried; but he’s far too exhausted,

               sad, to make it work.  To

               be rooted is perhaps the most

               important and least recognized need of

               the human soul.  After hitching rides

               for hours, he’s here, on a

               country road, in stinging, horizontal snow,

               opposite a little church so dingy

               it seems grey in the darkness. 

               You have to cherish the world

               at the same time that you

               struggle to endure it   Perhaps if

               she’d gone first; but her teacher  -- 

               so proud of her progress  --  places

               her as the recital’s finale.  Every

               kind of reward constitutes a degradation

               of energy.  He wonders what all

               those at home will say, and

               then frowns  --  knowing what they’ll say. 

               She tries so hard to attend

               to the other pianists’ pieces, but

               a worm slides up her spine. 

               At the keyboard, she intends to

               begin immediately; however, the worm has

               crept too high   He awaits the

               next set of headlights and imagines

               sitting in silence in the car

               that will drop him off in

               front of his house.  When something

               is finished, it cannot be possessed. 

               He’ll trudge across the drifted yard,

               ring the bell, and  --  when his

               father opens the door, say, I

               came home.  For two full minutes,

               she’s motionless.  The divine emptiness, fuller

               than fullness, has come to inhabit

               us.  Then the teacher announces, This

                           event has concluded.

 

 

 

               Request list.  The woman who wishes

               for a child white as snow

               and red as blood, gets it. 

               He remembers his parents brushing snow

               off the shoulders of their bulky

               coats after they bustled through the

               back door.  If the best of

               our personality has to be preserved

               across death.  She wants the window

               frame red, so she paints it. 

               But the woman dies, and her

               child is given over to a

               stepmother.   He’s always thought differently about

               snow, after that.  To feel also

               the perpetual exchange of matter by

               which the human being bathes in

               the world.  He’s always wished to

               enter a house like that, and

               to have his own child see

               him.  Is this possible without preservation

               of our connections with such other

               personalities who have become a real

               part of our own-selves?  She wants

               the red frame and the window’s

               glass to make the whole room

               pink, and they do.  Beauty is

               the harmony of chance and the

                                     good.

 

 

               Ascent.  Cliff  --  eighty-five degree angle and

               so high that once they float

               to the top and gaze back

               down, they’re far ahead of where

               they’d been standing , at the base. 

               Everyone entrusted with a mission is

               an angel.  All they now see  --

               a grassy plain stretching away,

               declined just enough so that the

               horizon disappears.  They’re not sure what

               to do.  Angels are not usually

               left in such circumstances.  Whoever perceives

               God through matter is not all

               fire: rather, there is some matter

               together with the fire.  They don’t

               feel abandoned, exactly  --  only somewhat weighed

               down,  Also odd, since they’ve just

               been flying, hovering.  The circle, symbol

               of monotony which is beautiful; the

               swinging of a pendulum, symbol of

               monotony which is atrocious.  For quite

               a while of late, they’ve spoken

               human, but now switch back to

               angel.  This helps, though before long

               they experience  --  what?  One of them

                   speaks the foreign word, Gravity. 

 

 

 

               A flicked wrist  --  a dove vanishes. 

               Her six-year-old twins are standing right

               there, eight feet in front of

               the magician.  Her son begins weeping. 

               Isness is God.  She pats him

               on his back, but he just

               cries harder.  His sister puts her

               arm around his shoulders, then says,

               He’ll make it come back.  Finally,

               though, Mom has to usher both

               kids out of the hall since

               that wailing won’t stop.  In all

               beauty, we find contradiction, bitterness, and

               absence which are irreducible.  On the

               sidewalk, her daughter remarks that now

               they’ll miss the bird’s reappearance.  It

               won’t come back, her brother responds. 

               It is impossible for an order

               which is higher, and therefore infinitely

               above another, to be represented in

               it except by something infinitely small. 

               Sister  --  They always do, in magic. 

                   Brother  --  No!  --   Not doves!

 

Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as Lana Turner, Survision, Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, Golden Handcuffs Review, New American Writing, and The Brooklyn Rail. Underrated Provinces is recently out from MadHat Books. Bone Chapel is coming out soon from Chax. For more than forty years, Chace was a working jazz pianist. He is an NEH Fellow.

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Four Untitled Poems by Joel Chace

                 One filched wish  --  could be anybody’s                 They all check their hope boxes.                 He runs away from...