Three Poems by Steve Klepetar

 

Crow Logic

For a long time I wanted  

to wake 

before the snow finished falling,  

to walk between trees whispering  

in the old language of sleep.

A crow lifts from the fencepost,

black script against a pale sky.

The air folds around its wings.

I keep a chair by the window.  

Each morning I practice forgetting  

the names of things I love  

so I can relearn them—  

each syllable a thawed river,  

each sound the heart’s slow clock.

Odysseus Meets the Rock and Roll Poets in the Land of the Dead

They wait for him among the shadows,  

guitars slung low, cords snaking the dust.  

Jim leans against a glowing column,  

reading from a frayed and burning page.  

Janis hums a blues that shakes the air,  

and even the shades fall still to listen.

Odysseus has heard sirens before,  

but never voices this wild and cracked.  

He thinks of Ithaca trembling in sleep,  

his wife folding moonlight like linen.  

Her voice moves through the static of years,  

calling his name across endless waves.

Hendrix tunes a lyre made of thunder,  

sparks leaping between his restless hands.  

Kerouac drifts by in a blur of smoke,  

murmuring the road just runs below.  

Achilles stands near the edge of the pit,  

his heel tapping time to the riff.

Odysseus wants to ask about home,  

how to forgive the sea and its silences.  

Instead he strikes a bronze shell,

beating a pulse through the field of skulls.  

Morning flickers against his shield,

as the echo of a song rings in his bones.

The Surrealist Entrepreneur

He opens a shop that sells forgotten mornings.  

They arrive wrapped in pale smoke,  

prices scribbled on seed packets and ticket stubs.

Business is slow, but sometimes an old woman  

wanders in asking for the smell of snow  

just before it turns to rain. He finds it  

in a drawer under a tin of lost buttons.

On Tuesdays he markets anxiety in small bottles,  

the kind you twist open in meetings.  

At lunchtime he feeds coins to the copier,  

waiting for it to print a better childhood.

In the corner stands a telephone  

that calls no one but the future.  

It rings only during thunderstorms.  

He lets it ring.

Each night he counts the inventory:  

two and a half daydreams,  

a jar of distant laughter,  

one burnt-out idea still smoldering.

Before bed, he writes invoices to the moon,  

signs them with disappearing ink,  

and whispers the slogan he can never recall,

something about risk, something about love.

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.