Three Poems by Steve Klepetar

 

Blessings and Curses

The curse and the blessing

wear the same coat.

They knock at the same hour,

stamping snow from their boots,

asking to come in.

Once a bird flew through 

my kitchen

and I could not tell 

if it was luck or its opposite, 

only that it left a single feather 

on the table, gray as a question.

I bless the salt. I curse

the empty jar. I bless

the hands that filled it once

and curse the hour they grew still.

Somewhere my father is still walking

across a bridge I’ve never seen,

neither blessed nor cursed,

just walking, the way the dead do,

patient as weather,

waiting for the word that will let them rest.

Rules For Gamblers

Arrive believing the room was built for you.
The carpet's swirl of red and gold is a map
to somewhere in your darkest core.

Befriend the dealer. She has a daughter
in another city, a cold coffee, a thumb
worn smooth by the edges of cards.

Never count what you carried in.
Money is only weather, and tonight
the forecast promises a small, bright storm.

Superstition is a kind of prayer.
Wear the same blue shirt, touch the same
brass rail, whisper something kind to the wheel.

When the machine sings, don't listen.
It sings to everyone, a mother
crooning to children it will never feed.

Remember the night the moon fell
into your hands and left them full of silver.
Remember it often. Remember it wrong.

Time is a fiction of the clocks.
Here there are no windows, only
the long amber afternoon of chips.

Learn the names of the ghosts at the bar,
the man who lost a farm, the woman
who won a house and never found the door.

If luck turns her back, don't follow.
Let her walk the length of the casino
shedding sequins in her borrowed dress.

Phone Calls With the Dead

My mother calls from a city 

with no area code,

voice thin as the last light

over a field I have never seen.

She wants to know if I fed the cat,

though the cat has been ash 

for a decade, and I say yes, yes,

I fed him this morning,

I gave him the good food.

Behind her breathing, 

a train is always rushing away.

My uncle rings on Sundays,

tells the same joke about the horse.

When I was young I thought

the dead went quiet forever,

but now I know 

that somewhere a hand 

lifts a receiver made of nothing,

dialing, dialing, as if the past 

were only a number I forgot to save.

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.